Boeing whistleblower found dead in US | Hacker News Reader

Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

bbc.com

1,335 pointsneapolisbeach556 comments

Even if it was a suicide, that still doesn't mean it was self-motivated. People who care enough to be whistleblowers, would likely care enough about wellbeing of their family or other people - enough to sacrifice themselves once again under sufficient threats and pressure.

Or, even more likely, end things not because directly being requested to, but because of having no other way to NOT be forced to back out and cower at the very end, and betray themselves and other people.

All of which is unfortunately making it almost trivial for the adversary to steer things into that direction.

Granted, a movie, but something that portrays this well is The Insider (about big tobacco).

Choice quotes:

> Mike Wallace: Who are these people?

> Lowell Bergman: Ordinary people under extraordinary pressure, Mike. What the hell do you expect? Grace and consistency?

And:

> Lowell Bergman: I fought for you and I still fight for you!

> Jeffrey Wigand: You fought for me? You manipulated me! Into where I am now - staring at the Brown & Williamson building, it's all dark except for the tenth floor. That's the legal department, that's where they fuck with my life!

> Lowell Bergman: Jeffrey, where are you going with this? Where are you going? (Pause) You are important to a lot of people, Jeffrey. You think about that, and you think about them.

"Silkwood" https://youtu.be/iNyrSR5JGh8?si=pzqfoeC5g_Nm5-cz

Was this suicide by jumping out of window, like all of high profile suicides in russia?

> https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow...

His family doesn't believe so:

> The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

> "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

I think we could agree generally that "the hostile work environment at Boeing ... led to his death." It is appalling that they could apply this kind of pressure to one of their own .

I'm not familiar with the process here, but does anyone know if the officer makes the determination that this is a "self-inflicted gunshot wound"? I thought that kind of assessment was for the coroner to determine over the course of the investigation.

The coroner did say it appears to be self-inflicted, but that is not the final and formal judgement.

> The office of Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo O'Neal said that Barnett, who had been living in Louisiana after retiring from Boeing, died "from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

> Charleston police say detectives are actively investigating the case and are awaiting a formal cause of death as they try to determine the circumstances surrounding Barnett's death.

So he flew in from out-of-state, gave disposition next day, and magically got a gun bypassing 5-day wait period.

Mmmmmm. You don't even need the help of Occam's Razor here.

> So he flew in from out-of-state

Did he? I haven't seen any citation of his travel itinerary. Also, you can fly with a gun in checked luggage in the US

> gave disposition next day

TFA mentions his disposition "last week"

> magically got a gun bypassing 5-day wait period.

This is South Carolina. SC has no waiting period.

Never let pesky little facts get in the way of a good conspiracy!

So he got his handgun despite South Carolina's lack of reciprocity with his native Washington state.

Same article mentioned disposition next day, so you think he stayed two weeks at the seedy motel? I say he went back home between dispos.

So he skated background check after three days of non-response from ATF which automatically allows him to secure his firearm purchase?

> So he got his handgun

Was it a handgun? I haven't seen weapon type reported anywhere.

> despite South Carolina's lack of reciprocity

There are no gun transactions in SC that require a carry license. Guns can also be transported on airplanes without carry licenses. They can also generally be transported via car without a license.

> with his native Washington state.

He is a Louisiana resident.

> so you think he stayed two weeks

I don't know how long he was there, but it doesn't matter. Not only is there is no waiting period for buying a gun in SC, he could have brought one with him on his trip.

> at the seedy motel?

It was a Holiday Inn, which is a hotel and is typically 3-star.

> I say he went back home between dispos.

Does a source say that, or are you making it up?

> So he skated background check after three days of non-response from ATF which automatically allows him to secure his firearm purchase?

NICS typically takes a couple of minutes to process. In SC, like the vast majority of the US, a firearm purchase takes 30 minutes or less.

Meanwhile ...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/boeing-whistleblower-warning-n...

Imagine thinking it's normal for him to bring a gun to a deposition meeting.

Occam's razor says you should not multiple entities beyond what is necessary.

Our scenario is this: There's a guy in a vehicle. He is holding a gun. He has a gunshot wound. He has been under a lot of stress.

Explanation 1: The guy shot himself. Number of entities (people) required: 1

Explanation 2: Someone else shot the guy and staged the scene to look like a suicide. Number of entities (people) required: 2

Occam's razor says suicide is the most likely explanation

I would agree, except it is not some random average guy in a vehicle.

This was a concern citizen, who was a whistleblower against his employer, who had just begun a legal deposition, and there are billions of dollars at stake.

So - the scenario possibly just isn't that simple.

Source on Occam's razor being anything more than a philosophical framework? Kind of silly to even bring that up in this scenario without looking at the possible motivations or lack thereof.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/boeing-whistleblower-wa...

None. Did I imply that it’s something else?

> It said the 62-year-old had died from a "self-inflicted" wound on 9 March and police were investigating.

I wonder what gave them the conclusive evidence that the wound was self-inflicted.

> police were investigating

seems to be antithetical to

> conclusive

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13187989/Boeing-whi...

Suicide note? Given his interview, where he did not seem at all concerned (Jan 31) and his upcoming scheduled testimony (after years of pursuing this), call me suspicious.

Even if it was self-motivated, he could with the thought that this is an only solution to make public opinion aware of the Boeing problems.

Reminds me of Ian Gibbons, the Theranos scientist who spoke up about the company's practices. He took his life shortly before he was set to be deposed in one of the lawsuits.

According to John Carreyrou's book, the company hired law firms to stalk, harass and threaten employees; law firms which -- unlike Theranos -- are still operating, having apparently never faced any consequences for their actions.

His lawyers don't believe it is suicide.

“We need more information about what happened to John,” attorneys Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, who represent former Boeing manager John Barnett, said in a statement Tuesday. “The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public.

“We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life,” they added. “No one can believe it.”

He was scheduled to appear for day two of his deposition testimony the morning of his death. Had he died Sat night instead of Sat morning, the transcript of Saturday's testimony could have been read to the jury during trial. Obviously that can't happen now and whatever he was going to say in Saturday's testimony is lost forever.

> the transcript of Saturday's testimony could have been read to the jury during trial. Obviously that can't happen now

I'm not so sure: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/right_to_confront_witness:

> In Barber v. Page, 390 U.S. 719 (1968), the Court recognized a common law exception to the Confrontation Clause's requirement when a witness was unavailable and, during previous judicial proceedings, had testified against the same defendant and was subject to cross-examination by that defendant. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this exception in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), holding that "the Framers would not have allowed admission of testimonial statements of a witness who did not appear at trial unless he was unavailable to testify and the defendant had had a prior opportunity for cross-examination." Further, the Court in Crawford overturned Ohio v. Roberts (above).

The article said he was cross-examined by Boeing's attorneys last week and he now unavailable because he's dead, so it seems to be his deposition would fall under this exception.

It does not apply to dying declarations and statements made under impending death, this is well established in law. [1] Otherwise mob bosses would just pop off every witness and go fully free if it is completely inadmissible . There are limits not everything is admissible however not everything can be thrown away either

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt6-5-1/ALD...

And depositions are taken under oath, at least, so it is at least sworn testimony rather than just random conversations or documents that would normally need to be sworn to at trial to lay a foundation.

Boeing going to throw all their weight at motions to exclude these transcriptions, though.

Witnesses often write sign and submit a written witness statement into evidence before appearing. It's probably up to the judge now.

The written evidence gets sent to prosecution and defence. There would be a question whether witness actually did write the statement... but might be better than nothing

That might be the case as long as he was not suicided.

The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with.

Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.

I can't imagine that he would go through all this, and then decide it's not worth it anymore at the very end of his testimony.

People under extreme mental stress tend not to act rationally.

Yeah, some things you can only imagine, if you experience them.

Still, people murdered for way less.

Yet, in this case, aurareturn's comment seems way more plausible than yours.

Don't know anything about this guy, so just speculating, but I can easily see having a self-destructing behaviour being correlated with becoming a whistleblower since it is usually done at great personal expenses.

Subject of the amazing movie The Insider (1999), I might add for interested people.

> The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy is not something I’ve read about, but it must take a toll. A whistleblower, almost by definition, is a hero to strangers and a villain to those they know and work with.

Hmm I don't know, if I were a whistleblower I wouldn't really care what my colleagues would think. And I'd probably not continue working there anyway. After all I'd hate the company and my colleagues for all the wrongdoing that was the whole reason for the whistleblowing in the first place.

Of course people react very differently. And I'm very much not a team player so I'm pretty insensitive to peer pressure. I'm sorry that this person felt so bad.

> Or he was simply executed like in many corporate espionage movies.

When there's billions in market value on the line I don't think this possibility can be overlooked, no. I don't think it would have happened here but I don't think it's impossible

Barnett spent 32 years at Boeing. This would be like everyone you've ever worked with in your career being against you.

    Hmm I don't know, if I were a whistleblower I wouldn't really 
    care what my colleagues would think.

Also, many of his colleagues probably admire him. They are also aware of the problems and presumably want them fixed.

I gather that whistleblower claims are generally about systemic and management issues, and not "Bob from accounting is a stupid idiot."

The emotional strain of being a whistleblower and having your colleagues now see you as the enemy

This is a problem. Would you really see a whistleblower as your enemy? Is your identity so intertwined with your job that you take legal action against your employers so personally? Do you think your employer has that much loyalty to you? Boeing just had layoffs in December. I'm sure the issues this guy was uncovering played a part in that. We should all hold our bosses accountable. If they mess up, it's going to be bad for us.

>We should all hold our bosses accountable

And how are we supposed to do that? The entire point of a corporation's structure is that power flows exclusively down.

Luckily corporations are not the only structures in society. Courts, unions, citizens rights and democratically elected parliaments exist to counterbalance the incentives of the rich.

But not to give you health insurance.

Employer health insurance got its start in WW2 when Roosevelt instituted wage freezes. Shipping companies could not raise wages to attract more workers, so they raised wages indirectly by offering health insurance.

... except the rich can hire enough lawyers to use the courts as a weapon, and in the US, campaign contributions or other rewards for compliant politicians can mean that legislatures are often on the side of corporate interests.

This is ahistorical. These are institutions that largely exist to settle disputes between the rich and to punish the poor, and came into existence to balance the interests of debtor royals with those of the rich commoners who held that debt.

Corporations were a way to formalize public-private partnerships in which the sovereign would be able to shed the risks of beneficial ventures in its interest, by in exchange shielding private groups taking on those ventures from the normal legal consequences of their actions.

Unionize.

LOL, you venture capitalists sure modded that into the ground. You all will be the first ones to be pinned against the wall when the revolution comes.

A piece of information in this article which is not in that article:

> The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

> "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."

Driving someone to suicide is also a direct cause of death, and should be treated as such.

Being direct cause of death is treated very differently based on mens rea, or intent. Assassinating somebody and causing a death by accident or by negligence carries very different penalties. Being a cause of something and being guilty of it are different things.

It is certainly a bad thing, but I think it is an important note given the conspiratorial tone on some of the comments in that other thread.

Instagram would be shut down if we knew how many teens commit self harm as a direct result of it.

Are we arguing that it shouldn't be?

Great callout, thank you!

(This comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39682698 but we merged that thread hither. So when it says "this article" it means https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1238033573/boeing-whistleblow..., not the link at the top of the current thread.)

Then couple that with the stress of testifying. I have none of these issues but testifying like this would be hugely stressful.

I would have to suspect he felt trapped and this was the only way out of testifying.

Why does a whistleblower need to be identified? Why can't it be an anonymous tip to the regulator, who then uses the tip during audits to dig deeper and get to the truth? If they can't get to the truth even after being provided a tip, then their audit process is too broken? This whole business of non-anonymous whistleblower has too much power-imbalance and always seems to end badly for the individual.

The universal answer as to why (there is no fair, working system implemented) is, as usual, 'cui bono?' Any strategy to make whistleblowing power-balanced is by proxy heavily undermined by all forces that do not want it. Those forces, big corporations and their third-party henchmen, have heavy financial interests to bring down any just way of whistleblowing. They have a lot more money, time, manpower, influence and corrupt people who execute the dirty work.

To have incorruptible lawmakers lay the ground work is only the first step. Then the laws have to pass in their original intention, ie. waterproof wording without loopholes. Any unintentional loopholes have to be identified and fixed. Then the law has to uphold to "accidental" mistakes, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, official or secret changes, additional laws that reverse them, ....

Sometimes anonymous is sufficient.

But if the regulator is building a legal case in the US against a company and the only evidence they have is what the whistleblower provides, right to face one's accuser (a right we do not give up lightly) demands that the whistleblower be named.

Yeah, for case against human individuals that standard is absolutely essential. But for case against corporate entities that are already under periodic regulatory audits, that shouldn't be required. Then, within that non-compliant corporate, if there are individuals who committed the crime (criminal negligence, intentional malpractice etc) that lead to non-compliance, then to prosecute such individuals, they would need further evidence etc. But at least, the bad airplanes won't make it to airlines, just with anonymous tips.

Corporations are made up of humans and are, fundamentally, owned by people.

It should still be necessary that the State let people face their accuser before the State uses its monopoly on violence to deprive people of their property via the judicial process. Otherwise, I can think of all kinds of methods that a corrupt executive or judiciary could leverage against poeple ("we're shutting your company down." "Wait, why?" "Anonymous whistleblower. Definitely not because you're contributing legally to a PAC that's making it harder for the President to get reelected.")

Note that here I'm assuming that the whistleblower's participation is necessary. I think you are assuming a more happy path where the whistleblower can nudge the State in a direction to put more scrutiny on a company that they don't realize is a problem. That already happens and sometimes works, but we also have whistleblowers because only they have access to internal documents that the company has chosen not to divulge (legally or illegally). When the case hinges on those, it's still quite just that if the State says "We're shutting you down because you replaced door plug bolts with chewing gum," the accused has the right to say "What? Who the hell is telling you we replaced door plug bolts with chewing gum, and what evidence do they have?" Because without that back-stop, it's just the government presenting evidence that they got... somewhere... and that's open to even more abuse than the status quo.

> right to face one's accuser

I will buy this ‘corporate rights are human rights’ argument when a corporation is put on death row for murder.

Corporate rights aren't human rights, but the right to face one's accuser should be extended to any entity under the judicial process.

I don't think it's wise to just hand the government the power to dissolve corporations on evidence they got from... Somewhere, they don't need to tell you. Imagine how that could be abused by a corrupt executive or judiciary.

Closed court proceeding, lawyers only, and a jury of peers to know they exist then with enough proof without naming them.

But that wouldn't solve the original issue. The defendants are the ones who pose a threat to the whistleblower.

"Self-inflicted wound"? Obviously the story is still developing but I'm immediately skeptical.

EDIT: Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound. archive.is has the original.

https://archive.is/wj0LE

Same. I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but that is very strange wording.

Self inflicted wound in the middle of several days of scheduled depositions.

Just about as suspicious as could be.

Agreed. This has red flags all over it.

I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later. Corporations can be shielded from liability when this happens. One executive could end up charged with a crime but the company itself can always paint them as a rogue agent who acted independently.

IMO, this will keep getting worse. Commodification of scapegoats.

> I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later.

Always_has_been.gif

I mean, nestle still exists, as does the entire financial and energy industries.

> I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later.

When have they not? This is literally the entire point of limited liability for hundreds of years. Goes back to the East India Company.

I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government. The East India company was a good example, they had their own army & fought wars of conquest.

Yes, there were very few such corporations before and they were not at the core of a nation's economy as they are today. The fact that they failed spectacularly should have been a lesson for us to avoid them! Instead, we've enshrined the concept of corporate personhood into law.

Kind of insane to think that we have a construct which at the same time claims that a corporation is a person but also that the corporation is not liable to legal prosecution for its crimes as a person is. I.e. a corporation itself cannot go to jail as a person can. The corporation can do whatever it wants and continue operating unimpeded so long as it can keep finding new people to serve as scapegoats.

Imagine if some people would have the same rights as corporations; the bosses of mafias could assassinate anyone, pay a fine, throw a scapegoat under the bus and continue 'business' as usual. Police couldn't even reach a plea deal with the scapegoats because no matter what information the scapegoats revealed about the big boss, it would be inadmissible because actually, in that very special case, the big mafia boss is not a person but, conveniently, an abstract entity and therefore it cannot physically go to jail. How about shutting down their operations for x amount of time? That should be the bare minimum... It could be applied to corporations, why is it not?

> I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government

Where do you think the "lobby money" comes from ? /s

There is no handy 24-hour surveilled jail cell for him to be in

I'm not convinced. Boeing doesn't want more attention, depositions are stressful, and whistleblowers are predisposed to martyrdom. If you're Boeing, this doesn't make the problem go away, it makes it worse.

if you are Boeing the company that would be stupid sure

but what about some specific arbitrary high level figure from Boeing?

One which if the person says certain things might lose their job because of this or which is afraid to lose more then their job (e.g. due to them knowingly acting in gross negligence for personal gains).

Which one is worse, lose your job or end up in prison?

You don't end up in prison if there isn't anyone to testify against you.

So, you kill all the people investigating this death as well? Spund logic, really, sound logic...

Reminds me a bit of Death Note.

It's keep your job and your freedom if you're not caught.

Sure. I guess this explains the size of the US prison population.

One thing I've been realising over the last few years is that that prison population is almost completely unrelated to actual crime rates.

My standard example is heroin, which is in the most severe rating category of illegal drug. In the UK, the number of users of just that drug on its own is close to triple the entire prison population.

Call me back when the US prison population is full of corporate executives.

This was a silly suggestion.

Did you not realize that almost all crimes that have ever been committed, very much including by smart accomplished people with a lot to lose, violated and belied this theory of rational behavior?

This is the calculus for every crime, and yet somehow crimes happen.

> this doesn't make the problem go away

what if they have bigger problems in the pipeline. It could estimated to be worth exacerbating this issue if it discourages the next.

What if they don't?

All that means is that the murder wouldn't be rational. Do you expect rationality from the executives that gutted one of America's best companies?

For the long game, Boeing has just increased the price of whistleblowing for any would be blowers.

> Boeing doesn't want more attention

The US also doesn't want Boeing carried through the mud.

You're talking about a company that shipped MCAS in its new planes without training pilots on what it was or how it worked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

So, an argument that this murder wouldn't be rational, gives me zero confidence that it didn't happen.

Pilots were trained in how to deal with runaway stab trim. There were three MCAS incidents. The first one you never hear about because the crew followed the runaway trim procedure and safely completed the flight. The second one did not and they crashed. The third received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive that reiterated the procedure, apparently forgot about it, and crashed.

Yes, the MCAS design was defective. The crews didn't follow their training, either.

Like it or not, it's the truth.

Boeing doesn't order assasinations. If he was assasinated, it might have been someone at Boeing, who still has a clean slate but knows that the whistleblower knows something he did, and has the right connections from working for a defense contractor.

I wouldn't be so sure. It's well documented that the CIA take a "keen interest" in Boeing (and indeed that European security services do so with Airbus), undertaking corporate espionage and sabotage on their behalf. They consider aerospace to be "strategic" or some such.

You shouldn't be convinced, no one has presented any evidence of anything happening or not happening. Being suspicious means the situation warrants investigation.

If there were foul play, the person who made the decision may not agree that this is worse for Boeing, or may not even care about what effect it has on Boeing at large. Being accused of something no one can prove might be greatly preferable to having specific evidence come to light, especially if the scrutiny will fall on a massive company instead of on you in particular.

Who says it was Boeing? They're a publicly traded company; many would stand to lose a great deal of money should they go under.

Then there are those that stand to gain from added chaos.

Time may never tell, but let's not pretend people aren't motivated to do worse for less.

Have you ever been deposed?

It's an incredibly stressful process, and he's already going through the hell of being a whistleblower.

I'm sure Boeing was ready to depose him more and more in order to try to get him to shift his story.

Have you ever shot yourself?

Certainly people have committed suicide in stressful situations, but there is no situation where it makes sense that someone would kill themselves, and countless people get deposed who don't.

Continuing to depose someone to get them to shift their story is a reasonable strategy if their story can't be backed up by evidence and you aren't worried about anything coming out in the testimony. It's a terrible strategy if the witness is about to reveal where the skeletons are buried.

Thank you. You put it far better than I could. And this man was in the right position to know exactly where they all were.

A Quality Manager's entire job is to investigate and track why everything bad happens, and when they aren't allowed to fix it, who is responsible for the decision to intentionally not fix, and the rationale provided to justify an overrule. Though I've heard in some strange foreign lands (safety critical industries), the Quality Department isn't hamstrung by being worked around by a member of the C-Suite.

Yep, the timing of his death is just too on point.

>Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound.

Another source backs this up, and seems to have interviewed the man's attorney in the past. [0][1]

It's tempting to dismiss foul play on the basis that it's too brazen in the middle of a deposition. However, that's also the height of plausible deniability because cross examinations can get personal and thus emotional.

---

I can't help but be reminded of a film quote:

"But that's the way it works with corporate murder. Boss gets wind of something, calls in his head of security, who talks to someone, who talks to a friend of someone. Finishes up with an answering machine in a rented office, a couple of sensitive gentlemen in a blue pickup truck. They will never know who ordered the hit." [2]

[0] https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/boeing-whist...

[1] https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/brian-knowle...

[2] https://www.scripts.com/script/the_constant_gardener_702/17

Movies aren’t real dude.

In the real world, the security team just handles it directly. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees...

Edit: In all seriousness, I don’t think the situation presented in the aforementioned movie quote is implausible, though I’m inclined to doubt foul play here unless there’s specific evidence to that effect. Depositions can be extraordinarily stressful; compound that with the anxiety of being a whistleblower, and I can see how someone could snap. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there was foul play.

Suppose you believed that a particular someone is responsible for, through incompetence or on purpose, deaths of 500 people and is making your life hell. Do you:

A - kill yourself

B - burn his house down first, at least

I think that when someone is experiencing extreme anxiety over an extended period of time, their actions aren’t necessarily going to be logical. Most people will recover once the stressor is removed. Some people will give up and choose option A. Still others will choose option B.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.

Corrected link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co%2...

>Movies aren’t real dude.

If anything, the film quote is less realistic here insofar that it's not in context of a defense contractor with a large Rolodex.

Professionals tend to leave doubt rather than evidence. That said, even they make mistakes and therefore—to your point—it's unlikely it would be risked despite layers of intermediaries.

On the other hand, media cycles are short and PR is already in the trash can. This took place at the height of plausible deniability, and barring irrefutable evidence proving it wasn't foul play, it will be giving other potential whisleblowers pause.

The man's own attorney wrote:

"They found him in his truck dead from an ‘alleged’ self-inflicted gunshot."

Was it multiple shots?

>Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound.

A YT video speculated (wildly one would say) about someone's recent death simply because the cause was not announced by the family as it was under (UK) inquest. In some jurisdictions it is inappropriate (or even illegal) to state or speculate on a cause of death when it is under investigation as a suspected suicide, even just to limit the possibility of copycat or revenge cases: Only since 2016 is it legal (in NZ) to report, broadcast or even post on the internet that a death is a suspected suicide before the coroner releases their findings. AFAIK, posting any details about _the method_ is still not allowed in NZ.

This may sound antiquated (and frustrating) in an age of instant news, but jumping to conclusions can have real consequences, at least legally in some edge cases.

No. NZ law is completely irrelevant to a UK news source's reporting on a U.S. death.

And the source is the man's attorney. https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/boeing-whist...

It's a code of conduct of UK reporting even if it occurs outside the UK: "the UK press reporting standards discourage reporting suicide methods"

I mean, he could presumably have died from other causes, but a gunshot wound is a gunshot wound.

In the UK press reporting standards discourage reporting suicide methods https://www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice/

It'll take a while to see if it has made any difference, as this version of the code was only adopted in 2021. Suicide rates in the UK appear to be fairly static over the last 20 years: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Russia => Poison

UK => Suicide (Remember the iran nuclear inspector and the guy from mi6 found in a suitecase)

Netherlands/Other => Disappearance (Arjen Kamphuis)

Imagine something similar happened in Russia :)

I am not going to be skeptical until they tell me exactly how hey got to the "self-inflicted" wound. How can you tell it was self-inflicted? Any witness? Recording? C'mon!

It was a breach of their guidelines to report a method of suicide, so it sounds like they were just fixing that. This is standard in the UK because of evidence showing that reporting methods can be followed by further suicides.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/harm-an...

Suicide, Attempted Suicide, Self-Harm and Eating Disorders

5.3.45 Suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm should be portrayed with sensitivity, whether in drama or in factual content. Factual reporting and fictional portrayal of suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm have the potential to make such actions appear feasible and even reasonable to the vulnerable.

Methods of suicide and self-harm must not be included in output except where they are editorially justified and are also justified by the context. We should not include explicit details that would allow a method of suicide to be imitated.

All these guidelines are what is making BBC unreadable for me. The language they use is just so artificial. I understand why they do, and how they feel like they have a responsibility to "optimize" language for some metrics, but in my opinion what really matters is the objective reality, not the phrasing. Maybe they could report more on the NHS inability to cope with mental health patients rather than avoid using the word gunshot in a country where gun ownership is so scarce.

There's no definition of "responsible reporting" that involves hiding information from the public to support a policy goal.

Anyone know why this isn’t on the front page with 96 pts one hour after submission?

Hacker News is extremely strongly manipulated. What users see as popularity order is actually the order manipulated to the moderators' liking.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#behavi...

I believe this is a good technical article for HN concerning safety culture of engineers, but moderators didn't think so.

It's not a technical article. It's a lurid media topic* about a suspicious-looking alleged suicide with zero information for a substantive discussion, and tons of fuel for sinister speculation. That's not what HN is supposed to be for. However, we can give this one a pass because the ongoing Boeing saga is of interest and there's clearly a community appetite to discuss this development.

Edit: even though the thread is terrible, which is just what one would expect from a sensational topic with zero information for a substantive discussion.

* Edit 2: I changed the word 'story' to 'topic' because I don't mean to disparage the BBC article itself - anigbrowl's reply is right on that

Flatly untrue. It's a soberly worded recitation of the available facts with multiple caveas; the frenzy of speculation stems from Boeing's increasingly tattered corporate reputation, not the story. This was written to far higher standards than (for example) a story from the Daily Mail or New York Post; I'm astonished that you would characterize this way.

Sorry—I'm tired and expressed that carelessly, and you're quite right. I wasn't talking about the article and am glad that it is as good as you say. In fact I merged the other thread into this one precisely because the BBC article was better.

What I mean is that the story itself, i.e. the significant new information, is a lurid apparent suicide, and there aren't any details about that, other than it happened. Not because the article is bad but because that is the only piece of information available.

The interest in such a story is neither technical nor intellectual and we shouldn't pretend that it is. It's a suspicious death story with sinister overtones. The curiosity here is not primarily intellectual, which means it's not really a good story for HN, but I'm giving it a pass because it is strange enough to be different and there's a community appetite to discuss it. Normally the latter isn't enough to justify a story remaining on HN's front page but there are degrees of community appetite and I recognize this one.

Good guy dang. Thanks for all your hard work making this place great.

I also think there are 2 different ways of discussing this - one is on mental health (if it's truly a suicide), shadowy agencies, Boeing's failures, and about corporate whistleblowing and its risks in general.

The other discussion is speculation on what this truly is - which is a more political/controversial topic.

There are lots of discussions on the former set of topics which are fairly popular on HN which explains why this thread is popular. I do think such discussions are valuable if there isn't a ton of speculation, which I think this thread is handling decently (although maybe I'm late enough to see all controversial comments already dead).

alleged is too strong. There's speculation which seems reasonable given the circumstances.

Good point. 'alleged' isn't the word I was looking for. I've changed it to 'apparent' above.

Dang, it would be nice of you if you at least addmitted that the front page as opposed to /active is heavily curated and hand-picked by you and other moderators. Anyone who has been on HN long enogh can see this, there is no point in phrasing it otherwise. And I guess people will be ok with this as long you guys are transparent about it.

I've posted thousands of comments about that over 10 years, starting on the day I took over Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)

I don't know why you expect people will find your old comment.

The required explanation is unnecessarily unreadable, so I explain it again.

As I wrote in my other comment, I meant the article as it relates to technology. My original comment is hidden below so I explain it again here. The safety of the environment surrounding engineers is a serious concern of engineers. Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.

So I wrote "concerning safety culture of engineers". Your interpretation is a complete misunderstanding. At least the points voted on my above comment indicate that your interpretation is not the majority. Hence, thanks to the many supporters, my above comment received many votes and was moved to this thread and this thread was eventually returned to the top page.

We must not remain ignorant or indifferent to unsafe working environments.

That source doesn't match your claim at all. In fact it completely explains the observed behaviour?

> Most tech related submissions with a hint of political partisanship will quickly be flagged to death by users (or die a slow death due to the inevitable flame war).

High comment rates on a recently posted story will weigh the story down. This is by design, and the quality of comments presently on this story does much to demonstrate the reasoning behind that choice.

Most likely the story will be reposted or "second chance" resurrected in the morning, when all the grownups are awake and not just those of us having a touch of insomnia.

Timezones are a thing. It's noon now and it was already morning when you posted this.

Sometimes when there is an inane story floating around on page one/two, I'll comment on it without up voting; its basically like a downvote as far as the algorithm is concerned.

Meta comments about how the story is ranking or explaining the ranking algorithm to people complaining about how the story is ranking are a great subject for an empty comment.

are we reading through the same set of comments?

I see nothing wrong with people speculating over something like this.

The lack of information renders such speculation necessarily vacuous, and it quickly degrades into dueling assertions of worldviews. There are lots of websites where that sort of thing runs unchecked. To the extent this isn't one, that's one of the reasons I prefer this one.

We do have information.

the guy is a whistleblower, went to court day 1, missed court day 2, and was found dead in his vehicle of unnatural causes.

attaching the adjective vacuous doesn't actually strengthen your point.

Leaving out "self-inflicted" obliterates yours.

Is there a flight search service that allows filtering out Boeing planes?

yes, the K.. something. Mentioned in one of the latest Last Week Tonight episodes

https://www.kayak.com.au/flights

Might need an account to access the filter, but that was the one shown.

Thanks a lot!

I hope Boeing goes bankrupt and a more careful competitor buys out their assets.

the USG will never allow that to happen. boeing itself is both a significant hard-power (military contractor) and soft-power (export authorizations provide a national bargaining chip, impact on domestic economy, etc) asset for the united states.

it is like intel in a lot of ways: sure, they're massive fuckups but there simply is not any chance that the US allows one of only three leading-edge fab companies to go under. As much as things are going to suck for a while, and especially as much as things could suck for individual employees... at the end of the day the fab side is not going to go under and the USG will shovel cash into the furnace to make sure of it. It is like Boeing - think of it as "buying at a discount, for an indeterminate future time", because the value cannot ever go to zero.

And even on the IP side the ownership of x86 and the x86 license is a significant soft-power asset for the US. Having everyone on the planet able to implement their own ARM cores is not really a great thing, when you could instead use it as leverage (like we do with ASML's machines).

Yeah, that's why I hope, but don't expect it...

My understanding is that it’s relatively common for airlines to change a flight's airplane for any number of reasons (mechanical, scheduling, etc). Even if you book a flight that's not on a Boeing, you might be assigned to one anyway.

Has someone numbers about suicides in cars with guns? This looks fishy to me. But perhaps I've just watched too many mafia films.

Suicide in a car is a “popular” way of doing this because there is less cleaning afterwards. Crime scene cleaning of a room costs like $20k. Bodily fluids go everywhere.

Thanks

Is cleaning a car less expensive? I feel like it would be harder, just considering that it's a cramped space that seems difficult to scrub and full of stuff that is not easily washable.

I imagine you just scrap the (assuming reasonably priced) car, who would want to use it afterwards?

You can sell it. Or auction it. You never know who will buy it.

I feel like most people would rather just scrap it if they can afford to. Even if someone else were willing to pay a large sum of money for the car, I'd be too weirded out to go sell it.

That's exactly what would make item special for some.

Also less traumatic for your loved ones to replace a car than have to move houses because they can't get the image out of their mind.

I thought this happened in front of a hotel?

In his car in front of the hotel.

That doesn't make sense, what if car cost 50k (or more), do you think anybody would ever want to drive in it? Family traumatized by just looking at it, heck any similar car, ever ?

Low cost would be ie in your backyard, jump from the bridge (with added 3s thrill), OD on opiates or some poison you don't feel or similar. Or go fight russians if you really stand up for western values, that may actually cure the need if you make it through.

> do you think anybody would ever want to drive in it?

You can sell the car and the new owner might not know about it (or care if the price is good enough).

Car offers a certain level of privacy in your last moments while being considerate to the family by not doing it in your home.

> Low cost would be ie in your backyard, jump from the bridge (with added 3s thrill), OD on opiates or some poison you don't feel or similar. Or go fight russians if you really stand up for western values, that may actually cure the need if you make it through.

Those are suicide fantasies of people without depression / under extreme pressure.

The timing is suspicious but that doesn't mean it wasn't suicide. If he was determined to kill himself there might be several reasons to do it today. Maybe he wanted to cast suspicion on Boeing. Or maybe he didn't want to testify - could be tons of reasons for that. I have no idea. Just saying the two events could be connected without it being murder.

> Maybe he wanted to cast suspicion on Boeing

What he already disclosed has done far more harm than that.

And what he could have said would certainly cause even more harm than his silence.

I second that

Oh yes, it's ridiculously unlikely. Just the point is there are lots of ways for the timing to be not a coincidence, yet the death still a suicide.

It's every bit as suspicious as Epstein's death or all those people connected to Putin who mysteriously fall out of windows.

> Maybe he wanted to cast suspicion on Boeing.

Ridiculous. Although I agree there's more than one possible, highly disturbing explanation for this.

>Maybe he wanted to cast suspicion on Boeing

suicidal people are, be definition, crazy. It's impossible to put yourself in their shoes. When the switch flips, suicide just seems like the logical solution and is very matter-of-fact. It's impossible to really understand what's going on in a suicidal person's mind at the time.

/have some experience here a couple decades back

He should have done like Snowden. Got out of the country before exposing material. Shouldn't a witness in a high profile case like him been granted some sort of police escort by the court?

Guy paid the ultimate price for freedom of speech and informing the public. Wonder if someone will sustain there is no threat to freedom of speech because the lawsuit involved the company where he was employed, not the government.

I'm also reminded of Aaron Schartz, as well as the ordeal Steven Donzinger went through against Chevron. Fortunately survived, but had to serve some prison time[1].

[1]. https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/steven-don...

Name a juridiction where he would have been both i)taken in and ii)secure.

Airbus HQ

how does one get from the us to france, quickly?

On a Bombardier, via Canada?

ahhh, just get to quebec, tiré d'affaire.

Preferably not on a Boeing flight.

The fastest way is probably to reach Saint Pierre and Miquelon by ATR 42 or by ferry from Canada. France's overseas collectivities are amazing.

(unironically) HK

As long as he stuck to whistleblowing American companies, Russia.

Then his testimony would be easily dismissed by the government as Russian propaganda

China, Vietnam, Cuba, to name a few.

Aaron Swartz, not Schartz.

On the one hand, violence is always a threat to speaking freely. This is not new. At the very least getting fired is what most people can expect if they speak freely about legitimately confidential things at work. Even things like disparaging co-workers, in a public setting, or harassing people at work by saying inappropriate things can get you fired.

You are free to speak freely, but there are consequences, Free Speech does not imply uou can say what you like consequence free.

In some (criminal) industries, speaking freely will get you killed. If Hollywood is to be believed, speaking against the rich and powerful can get you killed. (I suspect it happens, I suspect its nowhere near as common as Hollywood makes out.)

To your point though Free Speech (capital F) has a specific constitutional meaning, and covers the consequences the govt can apply to your speaking freely. It does not promise no consequences by companies.

There is no threat to Freedom of Speech here, because what he was doing was not that kind of speech. Of course there is a chilling effect on speaking freely, his speaking out had consequences (regardless of the hand that pulled the trigger.)

In short you can't just say whatever you like (as E Jean Carrol understands) without consequence. That's not what Freedom of Speech means.

No one care about your constitution outside your borders while the concept of Free Speech is universal and isn't defined by a geographicaly limited piece of paper. I'll never let your regressive law colonize my thoughts.

Can you please elaborate on what you consider the Universal definition of Free Speech to be?

Are you suggesting that people have the right to say anything they like, in any forum, without consequence?

What I don’t understand is how does Boeing expect to make the issues go away? Covering up the problems just kicks the can down the road. They still have shoddy planes out in the world. Is quarterly performance now more important than not having planes fall out of the sky somewhere later on? I guess I’m naive here.

Whistleblowers dying in suspicious circumstances is more about sending a message to potential future whistleblowers than anything else.

The NTSB is bearing down on Boeing to give up the names of the staff that worked on the Alaska Airlines aircraft whose door plug blew out. At this rate, Boeing wont have to worry about whistleblowers. The investigation alone will be enough to open that can of worms.

I will believe it when I see it, can’t recall the last time a major executive went to prison

"VW executive given the maximum prison sentence for his role in Dieselgate"

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16743308/volkswagen-olive...

Boeing isn't a person, it's a collection of individuals all trying to further their career. That's another executive's problem, their job is just to maximize their career earnings / potential while at boeing and then jump ship when the timing makes sense to.

The pathological incentives pressuring people to behave in this way must be distinguished from the (perhaps idealized) job itself, as well as from actual people's actual behavior, which is not homogenous. When we describe things as you do, we risk reinforcing the diffusion of responsibility and slash and burn careerism that leads to this sort of mess.

People can maintain integrity and agency in environments which discourage such. It takes some sacrifice, but the more people tend to agree with and embody the previous sentence, the less it takes from each individual, and the more social inertia kicks in to aid the resistance.

The belief that some outcome is inevitable is often the primary obstacle to its evitability.

Perhaps the "Self-inflicted wound" refers to the injuries he suffered due to his own reporting on Boeing...

It's just crazy to think how much things can change. Boeing was once the pinnacle of innovation; a company which achieved something seemingly impossible at commercial scale and then perfected it to an incredible standard. It's just crazy to think that such perfect company could decline to such low standard both on the technical side and ethics side.

It looks like a HR problem. They replaced people who are very good at building stuff with people who are very good at politics. But no amount of bullshitting can substitute engineering excellence when it comes to keeping aircraft in the air.

THis isn't an HR problem, it's not an engineering problem, this is a "think about quarterly profits only, bean counting" problem. Engineers need time to do quality work, constantly rushing things for upping the rookie numbers before the end of the quarter is paramount at Boeing these days rather than proper engineering from all the stuff I've seen. Seems like a clown circus of executives over there.

>people who are very good at building stuff Are there any large companies still focused on this?

Found dead of apparently self inflicted wounds in their car...

Sounds very suspect.

With reports of a federal criminal investigation under way, very suspect. Civil judgments and penalties are one thing, the possibility of prison time is a whole different level of motivation.

'wound' singular

Change this to Russia and what is your first thought? Another mysterious death...

In a way it's better to indirectly choke a whistleblower to the point of death than to have to make them shoot themseleves twice in the back of the head on throw themselves off a skyscraper. That sort of thing.

Well-known Boeing critic and whistleblower John Barnett was found shot to death Saturday in Charleston, South Carolina. According to the BBC, the local coroner’s office said the gunshot wound that killed him was “self inflicted” and that police are investigating. Barnett’s body was found in his truck in a hotel parking lot. He had completed two days of depositions concerning a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit against Boeing. He was found after he failed to show up for his third day of testimony. Boeing told BBC it was saddened by Barnett’s death.

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/boeing-whistleblower-dea...

Regardless of whether there was foul play or not, it's looking pretty bad for Boeing.

They, or someone else with a stake of protecting the company, killed someone, or they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.

> they made someone so despaired he saw no other way than to kill himself.

Give the man some agency. If he chose to end his own life, that was his decision alone. And it may be entirely unrelated to Boeing. Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.

>Maybe he would have done it anyway at this point in his life.

You'd think after he was done with hearings, something he was been advocating and trying to have happen since 2017. Why would he do Boeing a favor and kill himself before he could inflict further damage to the company?

Inflict damage or have the company wake up to its duty to safety and realign with its original intentions?

I see whistleblowing as a call to integrity and healing, not an act of personal retribution.

Regardless, as a practitioner in the Quality field, I find the timing exceedingly suspect. Even if Boeing did rip him a new one in deposition, (which 32 years of employment and a documentation heavy culture more than equips a legal department to do) you don't close the ticket until it's resolved. He may have intended to do this all along; but not before all the dirty laundry got aired.

There is no way that any of this doesn't smell to high heaven. Not with a Federal criminal probe in the wind.

    Even if Boeing did rip him a new one in deposition, 
    (which 32 years of employment and a documentation heavy 
    culture more than equips a legal department to do)

There is no joy in this situation whatsoever but if these weren't matters of life and death, it would be darkly humorous to imagine Boeing's legal team attempting to simultaneously explain that he was a bad employee and that they for some reason chose to employ him for 32 years.

I'm really trying to steel man the suicide angle. If he was unstable enough coming out to go through with suicide, but according to all other sources was eager and ready going in, that'd suggest something happened between time_entrance & time_left that reduced a man with the conviction to take on his employer of 32 years on behalf of the public and his own standards; to a suicidal wreck.

Either A) They seriously ripped him a new one, by presenting evidence that countered the accusations being levied in his case sufficiently that he realized there was no further point going on.

or through rhetoric, or trickery, opposing council got him to believe that it was all his fault somehow.

B I can see, maybe. As someone whose done the work before, in spite of hostile management even, it iis very easy for a company to drum up every mistake or failure ever committed to paper. Sitting through 32 years of opposing council's best attempts to discredit you would be rough.

A I just can't see. Not with what we know. I could even understand a suicide after all depositions were done. We all collect ghosts; and they haunt us so well. Not before every last name was named. I dotted, and T crossed.

I suppose a C) could be an offer that couldn't be refused that would ensure his family'd be taken care of, but even that'd be ludicrous given what he already knew of their trustworthyness.

I guess I'll have to wait for things to end up in RECAP to read and make a conclusive decision.

Yeah, best to not try to attribute any meaning to this, as it would be bad for Boeing shareholders.

I wonder if there's a clause where retirement benefits are clawed back if you choose to become a whistleblower. That would hurt; 62 years old, your whole life spent at Boeing, and then all your retirement suddenly evaporates because you chose to cause problems.

I doubt it - such a clause would be trivially illegal, since it would be retaliation for reporting a safety concern.

Or someone with an interest in making Boeing look bad, such as Comac or a foreign government that wants to tarnish the reputation of one of America's largest exporters.

Why would someone do that? Boeing are plenty competent and making themselves look bad. Just fly a couple planes into the ground, forget a few nuts and bolts here and there, they are doing fine.

Feels like Michael Crichton's Airframe

I'm just going to take this story at face value, there's an infinite number of alternate explanations that I'd be powerless to talk about.

I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.

Mr Barnett worked for the same company for over three decades and physically watched it stop caring about building airplanes. I know that can take a toll, and the stress of martyring yourself to let everyone else know has to be intense.

And he not only watched the company fail spectacularly, in several of those cases those failures were connected to deaths, which I imagine he could feel personally responsible for not preventing, even if the corporate machine is really where the responsibility lies.

Table stakes for QA. It would have been worse because he reported and escalated these things just to end up having his department butchered further.

I still don't see a snap happening until after the testimony was over.

Those depositions are extremely stressfull. Add in years if not decades of emotional stress, prior. So yes, that can cause depression and can lead to suicide.

Another case where this happened was Therabis Edit: Theranos, obviously (my Pixel 7 keyboard and I won't become close friends any time soon): one of their lead scientists, who very much opposed cheating and their approach, developed a depression because of that and him being completely sidelined. He committed suicide the day before his scheduled depossition in a patent case.

Both cases are tragic, as is every suicide. Just because his death is convenient, doesn't mean in it was foul play...

> Therabis

Do you mean Theranos? Therabis seem to be CBD weed for dogs, which I deeply hope has not caused any deaths.

> Therabis

Caninabis would have been a better name.

I hope you don't mind me stealing this

So the guy goes on for years being an outspoken whistleblower telling his story to anyone that would listen, and decides while in his hotel waiting for his deposition that now would be the best time to end it and not move forward with holding Boeing accountable.

Occam's razor isn't pointed in the direction you think it is.

I mean, you are welcome to believe that, but if I was a betting man (or had money to bet), I doubt the company had him killed.

Corporate malfeasance, even that kills people, is rarely likely to put people in jail and executives are still likely to end up wealthy. Conducting the most obvious corporate assassination possible under extreme public scrutiny would lead to criminal prosecution of individuals that would definitely result in prison time.

Meanwhile, suicide is extremely rarely logical, and people who end there often were anywhere from having their entire future ahead of them to being amidst some of their most profound success.

> from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.

How did you overcome this?

Quit

+1 for quitting. This can be life saving. Finding new purpose then becomes possible.

The probable with quitting is that you can’t change the company from within anymore.

Missing a /s here for sure, no?

The idea that an employee can change a company from within is fantastical thinking.

It depends on your position and on the company. There are situations where you can have impact, in which case you should definitely use that. There have been plenty of cases where employees did seriously change corporate policies, but that's usually either in small companies or in companies where employees band together. And often the only impact you can have is to quit and take your skills to a more responsible company.

Attempting to do so is almost always a fools errand. Unless you have an outsized voice for your position then you will never actually turn a company around and attempting to do so will only add to your burden and worsen your situation.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

If you want to change the company from within then you are almost certainly dedicated to the goals of the organization and they are falling short, but it is loyalty to the organization itself that gets you clout. So in order to change the company, you first have to do the thing that you want to change, like cutting corners to meet a deadline. Only after you've kissed the ring will you be given power. This means that unless you are able to perform a revolution or coup within the company (maybe by unionizing), you will always be subordinate to its rotting fish head. If you want to change the company, the best way you can do that is by joining a competitor with better leadership and out-competing or being that leadership at a competitor.

Being a subordinate to people you don't respect is going to demoralize you, demotivate you, disempower you, and make you lose respect for yourself until you cannot function as a person.

CGPGrey's summary of the dictators handbook is also quite relevant: https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/rules-for-rulers

If you want to make a change, your only option is to get into a position of power, be subject to the same corruptive forces as the incumbent, and choose to be responsible instead of selfish, which is fundamentally an act of self sacrifice. His discussion of the video is way more thought provoking than the original video itself, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo

I've found (in <200~ employee companies) well structured exit interviews to be the best way to change a company from within. What better way to express your disapproval than by severing ties?

I mean, you kinda glossed over 1/3 of the issue... how do you quit “the entire world”? I think the person asking for advice wanted a real answer for “how can one deal with this difficulty”, especially because in the work situation, a new job won’t necessarily make any difference in terms of the internal struggles.

Maybe dealing with 2/3 of the question is enough to tame suicidal thoughts.

> how do you quit “the entire world”?

The short answer: you can’t, but you can change which parts of the world you actively engage with.

As someone on a long journey that seems highly relevant to this thread, getting help via therapy is one of the most important things I’ve done for myself.

A job that has sufficient problems and insane levels of stress can make the rest of the world look…different. Quitting my job gave me the mental capacity to find and see aspects of the world around me that are not worth quitting.

It has given me the space to recenter my life on things that support me, and to regain some optimism about what I can do with my life more broadly.

Quitting a toxic environment is an important first step. There are good places left. Good people to work for. Different ways to live life.

Choosing suicide is often related to a deep belief that there are no options left. This is often a result of compromised thinking based on intensely difficult situations/experiences that make it extremely hard to see beyond the current situation. I’ve had periods of dark thinking that I’ve since learned how to manage, and one of the most important things for me was getting a broader perspective on what was happening (and thus possible) outside of my own sphere.

You don't need to quit entire world, just the part that is toxic to you and poisons your life. You owe it to yourself and your family much much more than those sweet dollars that will kill ya (and nobody will see them anyway) or make you an old sour toxic fart.

If you are obsessed about quality, don't work at QA at big MBA-run corporations, just don't, thats a place for career-chasing folks. Find a place that appreciates and values your, or change your job altogether.

I know it sounds harsh but just look at this topic where it can and very often leads to (as long as the story checks, and nobody here actually knows).

This is hard, but typically, it happens when their interest doesn’t lead to the same decision as “the right thing.” This might not be inherently wrong: if you have a family who depends on you, keeping your job and making money is a morally valid choice.

What you want is for people to frequently see “doing the right thing” as the same as acting is what they see as their own interest: if being kind and polite gets you allies at work, and that’s how you get heard, respected promoted, or find a job, then people will be kind.

Things like cost-cutting to the point where there are legitimate risks to life are hard to find; therefore, people see others cost-cutting and getting promoted because they “stayed within budget” but (within their limited direct observation) never sanctioned. Engineers see project leaders getting away with it, but there are not good reputation mechanisms individualized enough: it’s “project managers always push for the cheapest…” Therefore, any PM who tries to go against the grain faces both prejudice and sanctions for not cutting costs.

You can implement reviews, promotions and reputation mechanisms that encourage behaviors that align short-term personal interest with the long-term benefit of the larger organization and stakeholders, but it’s really hard and non-trivial. Large organizations are far less efficient than they could be because of all the self-interested rent-seeking behavior, but the economies of scale are so strong that it doesn’t matter.

Humanity has had people who did not care about doing the right thing since forever, and still we thrived. As long as someone is doing the right thing, we're on the right track.

Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM

It helps to give power to people who care about doing the right thing, instead of to people who don't care. Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.

I would rather say democracy brings people into positions of power who are experts in pretending to do the right thing. But maybe I am to skeptical.

No, your skepticism is warranted. Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing, but of course people interested in power will try to game the system by pretending to do the right thing.

I think that’s right. It’s hard to know from a distance “they are definitely doing the right thing” so the appearance of doing the right thing is valued. Then, as a politician, appearing to do the right thing is sufficient and then pretending to do the right thing is often cheaper/higher output per unit of input, so pretending is rewarded.

That reminds me of Bruce Schneier's notion of security theater [1]. Implementing ineffective measures that give a feeling of being the right thing on superficial view, in security or elsewhere. Populism has understood that thoroughly.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater

The problem is not democracy (everyone getting an equal vote) but representative democracy (everyone getting a vote on a person once every N years who then gets the power to do what they want which they hopefully did not lie about in order to get those votes).

Delegation (everyone getting an equal vote on all issues but being able to designate someone else to vote on their behalf on any given issue without forfeiting the right to vote directly on other issues) does not suffer this problem and is arguably more democratic.

Additionally certain forms of representative democracy make this problem worse like first-past-the-post voting resulting in strategic voting, i.e. voting not for the person you think best represents your interests but most likely to win while still representing some of your interests, encouraging politicians to do the bare minimum and avoid taking strong stances on divisive issues to remain "electable".

The problem is that representative democracy centralizes power in a ruling class (sometimes literally, due to nepotism and dynastic reputations) whereas delegation maintains decentralized power while allowing for that power to be temporarily centralized (e.g. many people delegating to the same individual) but always with the understanding that everyone is free to reclaim their power by withdrawing it from their delegate on a case by case basis. In Germany a variant of this was promoted by the Pirate Party under the label "liquid democracy" - although they of course heavily focused on a possible technological implementation of it rather than promoting the idea itself first.

I've been thinking about something similar. Before the internet, this sort of system would be extremely impractical, and representative democracy is a pretty obvious choice, given the limitations of the time. But now, with the internet, it's a lot easier to handle this in a fluid way with little friction.

The only downside might be that deep discussions of nuanced topics between the delegates might be useless if most votes ignore the discussion. Compromise might get a lot harder, and nuance and depth might be lost. On the other hand, it might also kill corporate lobbying. It's worth a try, and definitely an improvement over first-past-the-post systems and those where politicians are bought by corporate interests.

The problem with "liquid democracy" is that it's unappealing to those who would have to implement it because it takes away their power (and financial prospects in the form of lobbying). It's the same problem as with trying to replace first-past-the-post voting (i.e. why should the major parties that always get to be in government do something that would give the smaller parties a better chance).

> Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing

If this was true, wouldn't democracy improve standard school curriculum so the general public at least has a chance at being able to choose quality leadership, see through the incessant lying/untruthfulness and misinformation of politicians and the media/journalists, have the ability to at least sometimes think of things from an absolute (what is maybe possible, were we to try) rather than relative perspective, etc, instead of being led around by their noses like oblivious if perhaps well meaning schoolchildren by these people?

Only if all the political parties benefit from people being able to make good judgements. If you have a party that benefits from an uninformed or misinformed public then it's significantly easier to lead them around through fear and lies than it is to govern well. Once they gain power they can reduce education spending, meaning they have more people they can direct more easily. Meaning they can get more power, and repeat the cycle.

If this is true in a two party system, would it not be logical to expect that the party that does not want to exploit an ignorant population would be directing significant attention and resources to educate the public while they hold power (and engaging in non-stop rhetoric on the matter at all times), which if all goes well could gain the support of the educated, permanently?

I sometimes wonder if people have somehow been conditioned to not think about this topic with the seriousness it deserves. I wonder, if we were to search through various academic literature about the nature of humans, might we find some theories about how it may be possible to pull something like this off?

Yes. And they do. The functioning ones, at least. Corrupt democracies obviously don't, but that's the nature of corruption. But I'm pretty sure the best education systems are generally found in democracies.

Do "democracy", "functioning", "obviously", "don't", "is/am/are", have precise, useful and non-misinformative meanings in this context?

In other important fields (anything involving money for example, or programming), do we sometimes discuss things accurately, and consider things with respect to what is or may be possible, and (actually, objectively) true (basically: pursue optimality)? Might it be at least plausibly beneficial to consider applying that rigour to evaluating and designing our democracy?

You can deconstruct language all you want, but it's not going to change basic facts. You're not going to find quality education in North Korea. You will find it in Finland.

You can state your vague opinions as facts all you want, but it doesn't make them facts.

Imagine if we wrote code the way we talk about political matters, where trying to be correct was considered wrong, worthy of punishment or banishment.

Or for a more apt analogy: imagine if the inaccuracy and untruthfulness in threads like this was tried in a thread about technology right here on HN: do you think that would stand unchallenged, and do you think those challenging untruths would be considered to be doing it wrong?

> You're not going to find quality education in North Korea. You will find it in Finland.

Is Finland the absolute pinnacle of what's possible?

And is there some reason the US cannot replicate across the country the quality offered there?

Perhaps I missed the class where we learned we should not think about such things - rather, whatever intuition pops into our minds is correct, necessarily.

I have no idea what kind of weird language game you're trying to play. If you have a problem with vague opinions, maybe you should be more clear about what you're trying to say there. You make vague claims of wrongness, inaccuracy, untruthfulness, and even punishment or banishment, without making clear what the fuck you're hinting at.

You doubt that democracies tend to have better education than dictatorships? Why? Do you have any basis for that doubt?

If you look at lists of countries with the best education, the top is dominated by democracies, with Finland usually at the top. Lots of dictatorships around the world are not exactly known for their quality education. The only exception to that that I can think of are communist dictatorships: Cuba has apparently pretty good doctors, the old USSR was pretty big on research and engineering, and China is currently investing heavily in engineering.

But their educations tend to focus entirely on STEM fields, and not on fields that might lead people to question the politics of the system; it's vital for the survival of dictatorships to suppress that kind of thinking.

> Is Finland the absolute pinnacle of what's possible?

I don't see why. There's always room for improvement.

> And is there some reason the US cannot replicate across the country the quality offered there?

Americans always claim that their country is too big to replicate the successes of Europe. I think that's bullshit; there's a political drive to keep government programs that help the people underfunded, to keep people stupid and poor, particularly from the Republican party that's increasingly pushing the US towards dictatorship. Because they know critical thinking is not going to help their case.

Let's try an analogy/thought experiment approach:

Imagine a scenario where a technology is invented, and it is working pretty good, and in some places it is objectively better than other places (it is better on a relative basis), which results in it having the appearance of being very good on an absolute basis.

Now, add in someone suggesting that it could plausibly be much better (for the sake of argument lets say 50% better), and this improvement could be very beneficial to humanity (let's throw in some compounding, self-reinforcing positive feedback loop effects), and this person just so happens (in this thought experiment) to be correct, though it is not possible to know he is correct (perhaps because of the nature and quality of the technology itself). However, for this 50% increase in optimality to actually happen, it just so happens to require substantial (say, 10%) public support, but that support cannot be achieved because of limitations caused by the technology itself.

((It would be nice to be able to branch thought experiments....I think doing one with and without that last attribute would produce interesting results.))

Now, we could swap in various object level technologies into this thought experiment, and see how things appear. My suggestion is that when swapping in education, this resembles the situation we are actually in, but because of the nature of this particular variable, we are not only not able to realize it, we cannot even consider it.

Hopefully this is clearer?

--------------

Or another angle: consider how we are constantly improving so many things, like really working hard at it (that's what I do all day every day where I work), yet: are there (or might there be) some things that we are not working really hard at improving, that an omniscient Oracle could see (and maybe we could as well, if we were able to look, or at least try) contain massive amounts of unseen, low-hanging fruit? And, might education be one of these things? (Or: culture, "democracy", etc?)

Or another angle: do humans in 2024 have any sacred cows?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_cow_(idiom)

>> Sacred cow is an idiom, a figurative reference to cattle in religion and mythology. A sacred cow is a figure of speech for something considered immune from question or criticism, especially unreasonably so.[1][better source needed] This idiom is thought to originate in American English, although similar or even identical idioms occur in many other languages. Background

>> The idiom is based on the popular understanding of the elevated place of cows in Hinduism and appears to have emerged in America in the late 19th century.

>> A literal sacred cow or sacred bull is an actual cow or bull that is treated with sincere respect.

>> One writer has suggested that there is an element of paradox in the concept of respect for a sacred cow, as illustrated in a comment about the novelist V. S. Naipaul: "V. S. Naipaul ... has the ability to distinguish the death of an ordinary ox, which, being of concern to no one, may be put quickly out of its agony, from that of a sacred cow, which must be solicitously guarded so that it can die its agonizing death without any interference."

I think a legitimately relevant reference to things like climate change, nuclear weapons, etc could be made here (with respect to the "so that it can die its agonizing death without any interference"....if we don't smarten up, we may be walking blind into big trouble), but I have to get my ass into work!

> Hopefully this is clearer?

A bit. You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle. I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements that care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.

Of course there's a contradiction in there, and one that many people today are struggling with: the ideas that promote that restrictive/dogmatic society could themselves be a threat to an open democratic society. Should we allow those ideas and risk our open democratic society, or should we restrict them and thereby become less open and democratic? What happens if people vote against democracy? Which is essentially the same question as: does freedom and bodily autonomy mean you can sell yourself into slavery? Popper's paradox of tolerance also feels related, although that's easier to resolve.

But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.

> You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle.

Yes, the omniscient oracle is a representation of the ability in thought experiments to know via the definition of the thought experiment what is true (virtually, within the thought experiment). This is unlike the object level reality we live in and are discussing, where what is true is only somewhat known (which itself often cannot be known) - for example, in this scenario, it is not known:

- what goes on behind closed doors in political circles

- what the intentions of all political participants are

- to what degree each individual person within our "democracies" are optimal

- to what degree the complex structural design of our "democracies" is optimal, or is as advertised/perceived to be <---- this is, the point of contention

> I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements....

Let's see:

> ...that...

Wait minute....what is the nature of this "realness", where you can somehow possess knowledge of many thousands of object level actors and activities whom you have never met, and have no way of monitoring?

> ...care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.

Here you seem to be comparing "democracies" to dictatorships, an easy win, as if somehow the point of contention in the text of the conversation above is that. It is not.

You have not ~disproven or even argued against the speculative question/proposition contained within the thought experiment, but rather dodged it.

> Of course there's a contradiction in there....

That is not the only problem in there.

Noteworthy: accurately and comprehensively discerning the ideas contained within language (thought experiments, etc), with proper usage and references to object level vs abstract representations of reality (which can easily be mistaken for the thing itself, people being what they are) is a fairly sophisticated skill...one that needs to be learned, and that can easily not be noticed to be lacking, particularly during the discussion of "culture war" topics like this one.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

> What happens if people vote against democracy?

Here you are referring to "democracy" the abstract concept, but there is another existence of democracy: the object level entity that manages our affairs (and all the other things that the individual actors do within it: some known, some unknown, some hallucinated), and like any object level entity, it is only as good as it is. And, our ability to know what that is, is limited, a factual phenomenon which many people's knowledge of is also limited. And, this state of affairs is directly downstream from our education system.

> But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.

Yes, and it may not be possible to be otherwise, which I would say is strong evidence for my very point: the quality of our educational system is suspiciously (to me) low, on an absolute scale, and that it is very interesting that many if not most people do not have the ability to question, as they could easily do with most other things (how fast a car can go, how efficient an algorithm is, whether an ideology opposed to one's preferred ideology (ie: dictatorships) is flawed, etc), the very organizations that exert control over the world they live in more than any other.

I really struggle to understand how this can be so universally uninteresting, and I truly wonder if it is purely organic.

> people interested in power will try to game the system

There need to be heavy consequences. You used to be ostracized, at least for some short period of time and in some scenarios, for selfish behaviour. Now, it seems like we approve of and even encourage douchebags because everyone's gotta get theirs.

In this situation I don’t think you can attribute it to capitalism because Boeing is a defacto monopoly. Capitalism should lead to competition. Competition should lead to alternatives when one of the market participants has quality control issues.

Well, there's Airbus who compete. Everyone would probably be switching to them if they weren't sold out like ten years ahead.

But doesn't that either disprove capitalism as an realistic working system or make an argument that the state have an obligation to protect the market by destroying large corporations before they become dominant.

A lot of the traditional critiques of capitalism have been that it will inevitable degrade back into mercantilism if the capitalist are not challenged by an democratic state and functional trade unions, but alowed to merge into large powerfull entities like google, Boeing, microsoft and Facebook.

There are a couple of ways to look at it:

1. If another player(s) are able to start and freely operate as a competitor then talented engineers will have more options for employment and each entity will have to compete on both price AND quality in order to win business. This requires continued investments.

2. If the original player is able to use regulatory frameworks, lobbying and other tactics to enforce a monopoly, then the state has a duty to break them up to ensure competition.

Option 1 is more free market where the problem solves itself. Option 2 involves use of the government to both create and resolve the problem.

I don’t personally take issue with either because the solution is still competition. Whether Lockheed, SpaceX, a Boeing breakup or some company we haven’t heard of gives it to us isn’t a big concern. We just need competition.

We all know that the Boeing mess will end up with everyone involved in creating the mess walking away richer as the state goes in an cover whatever bill to keep boeing from collapsing as the alternative will be for non-american companies to take over the entire commercial airoplane manufacturing sector.

The problem with the just more competition argument is that it never actually works once a market reach a broken state it never self correct as too many people is going to be affected for that to be allowed to happen, which is exactly how mercantilism keeps creeping back, as the nation state behind it falls into the trap that protecting whats working is preferable to allowing the chaos of creative destruction to take down an entire sector of the nations economy.

It can work as long as we're willing to let companies fail. Typically, a huge company shouldn't fail quickly, it should slowly downsize as it loses revenues to a competitor while it has time to react.

The government stepping in to just hand out money will preserve the broken status quo because the failure incentive has been removed.

Potential sudden failures due to outside factors like the collapse of the banking system are certainly different situations though.

Unfortunately, "should" is doing some heavy lifting here...In reality, the constant requirement for MORE profit makes it so that every aspect of business or production, including quality control, is a slider conflicted with profit, and sacrificed until it needs to be corrected, as little as possible.

Quality control is only conflicted with profit when profit isn't dependent on quality. Boeing has clearly taken a huge financial hit over this, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to say that they were too obsessed with profit.

You could argue that they were too lazily profit motivated, that they were moving sliders to reduce costs without considering consequences. But capitalism doesn't incentivize laziness and it did not reward them for it here.

> Capitalism should lead to competition

Only in a free market. Very few markets are truly free. And large concentrations of capital tends to make markets unfree.

Most democratic countires have capitalist style manufacturing industries so I'm not sure that holds. Non capitalist attemots to make planes haven't gone that well.

Though you can regulate capitalism better. Encourage founders to run the things rather than buy out guys, have better trade unions and so on.

There is capitalism proper and there is absurdly leveraged subsidized speculative financial managerial capitalism.

There is always nuance on the real world. Things can’t be explained anymore in the terms of XIX century Marxism. If Marx were alive today probably he would completely rewrite Das Kapital.

> Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.

How did you arrive at this conclusion? The earliest versions of democracy used sortition for selection and thus couldn't account for doing the right thing. And of course we all know about the "tyranny of the majority" so I wonder why you believe democracy is somehow biased to selecting "people who care about doing the right thing".

Democracy represents the will of the people, who, in general tend to care about morality and doing the right thing (although of course they can be misled and manipulated). Capitalism tends towards maximising profit, which often comes at the cost of doing the right thing.

> I wonder why you believe democracy is somehow biased to selecting "people who care about doing the right thing".

Because people are. Why would something be considered "the right thing" if there weren't people believing it?

I realise that Trump campaigning explicitly on doing the wrong thing and still being popular, would seem to contradict this, but he's an outlier, and apparently many of his supporters still somehow believe that whatever he's doing is somehow right. Of course they've been misled and manipulated, but that's the big vulnerability of democracy (although it's also possible in every other system).

> Democracy represents the will of the people, who, in general tend to care about morality and doing the right thing

This isn't a given. History has lots of examples where a majority of people do not care about morality or doing the right thing, and in fact use their voting power to elect similar-minded leaders. Your post even contains a perfect example, but he is not an outlier.

I suspect a false dichotomy. What is a concrete example of something undemocratic about capitalism?

> How did you overcome this?

Not OP, but for me it was recognition that this perception is my own problem to solve, that the vast majority of the entire world is trying to do the right thing by their own perception, and that I lack enough context to be the judge. Which isn't to say there are no bad actors, but right about the time you think everybody but you is wrong, it's worth taking a step back and reevaluating.

Just to chime in on the 'alternate explanations', I think it's important for anyone with conspiracy ideas to remember that the case he was being questioned in was not an investigation into Boeings liability as an airplane manufacturer, but rather a civil suit he made against Boeing for defamation of character.

And companys would never bring the full instruments to force on a single person. PIs etc, psycho-terror and so on and so forth..

The Ebay stalking case comes up to mind

Which only came to light because they were shockingly inept about it.

That case absolutely made me wonder about how many big corporations have successfully executed more subtle versions of the tactic.

There is a name for that kind of state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

Your comment borders on gaslighting.

Barnett was involved in a whistleblower lawsuit against Boeing, alleging serious safety concerns at the North Charleston plant, where he managed quality for the 787 Dreamliner production. He claimed the push for speed compromised safety, with sub-standard parts being used and a significant failure rate in emergency oxygen systems.

Despite raising these issues, he felt his concerns were disregarded, leading to legal action against Boeing, alleging career damage due to his whistleblowing.

In which any evidence admitted or discovered in his case would become potential admissable evidence that could be leveraged in the Fed's criminal probe as a matter of public record. And since it was a defamation suit, his entire history was discovery fodder with a much lower bar to cross for subpoena's or discovery than the criminal probe would be. Then there's potential leaksge to the media and public (and thereby regulators) of exactly what to look for.

Don't stop thinking at the first order consequence/event. There is generally much more to it.

I endure the feature creeps of computer languages with their compiler implementations (ISO and gcc extensions are the worse). Sneaky and vicious planned obsolescence scheme on a 5-10 years cycle.

It is very accute too. Just a bunch of scammers with an army of brain washed dudes or worse. We have a name for them: Big Tech.

Everybody has limits.

But in this very case, this is extremely unfortunate timing... or even more fishy than expected. Whatever, something is off in Boeing. Some screws need tightening ...

> I've had my own (thankfully brief) moments where I've thought about suicide just from the perception that my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.

Please share how you managed with this. I’ve been here for a few years - since I lost my wife - and some days I can barely hang on.

I have some experience with this. My advice is that these episodes come in waves and thus a simple yet vital rule has literally kept me alive: don't do it; this will pass. That plus therapy and a brief stint on antidepressants swung me from suicidal ideation to optimism.

I do think you have to watch your environment too. Just like alcoholics don't typically hang out in bars, we shouldn't hang out in places/jobs that depress us.

All of this is easier to say than do. I wish you the best.

Thank you. I am unable to find a therapist, and I was unable to manage with antidepressants. My mechanism right now is "see if you still feel this way a week from now" which - so far - helps. It isn't so much that I changed my mind, but more that I understand that there are people that depend on me being around.

Job is indeed a major factor. I don't currently work in a great place - it is generally a rather toxic place - and age-discrimination is, like most of the industry, rife. Pushing 54 it is hard to find a new gig, especially in this market, which doesn't help at all. After 30 years working at the forefront of this industry solving some of the hardest problems around, my skills, experience, and insights are just no longer required.

Life circumstances have left me without any kind of options for retirement, early or otherwise, so this is me for the rest of my life; I'm likely to die behind my keyboard. I'd rather go out on my own terms, watching the sun set behind the sea.

Not sure what to say, I always had family to catch me, intentionally or not, when I came even remotely close to what you are going through. All I can think of is this: nothing is worth sacrificing your life for. That, and most likely you are not alone, even if you din't know it. I am no religious person, so no prayers, but I sincerly hope you get through this!

Well what i can say is that there's always the possibility that you find true happiness somewhere you don't expect. It's gotta be somewhere you don't expect cause otherwise we'd have it by now! And since you can't expect it, you can't forsee it. But it's there, waiting for its moment.

I came close a couple times but I held on and eventually found things. One thing that keeps me on is wanting to fix things. It can be difficult to witness the ugliness of the world in perfect detail through the internet, but i believe it's actually better than it ever has been, and it's only improved because people like me decided to make it that way. You're just past 50 and you've worked some incredibly important jobs, corporate culture feels dime a dozen these days but that doesn't mean anything about your actual self worth. I can't even imagine all the knowledge and experience you have now! Learning one thing isn't just one thing, it's learning about the world, learning how to learn, and about all the things connected to it. Your knowledge is much more general than the words on your resume.

I can't tell you how to fix money, i know that's an extremely difficult problem for a lot of people and I've seen it hurt. But i can say that you must be an incredibly capable and knowledgeable person, who has true potential. The kind of thing that doesn't happen in a job, but in a spark. The kind of spark that you don't even know exists until it does. I hope you're doing okay friend

Thank you for your thoughtful comment

This is the worst advice but it worked for me: I just stopped caring and let go. I no longer believe that there is any justice in the world, and I accept that I cannot change that so I just look out for myself. It’s a bleak outlook but everything is so much easier now, and I’m still alive.

> there's an infinite number of alternate explanations

I see only one reasonably acceptable alternate explanation.

He either committed suicide or was suicided by someone at Boeing terrified about what would happen to them in jail.

Or killed by a nation state that thrives on creating conflict by amplifying two sided situations that lead to increased polarization and more instability… the problem with speculation is it’s just that speculation… I’m going to wait and see

Wait and see for what exactly?

Sure they did. While we're talking tall conspiracy theories - ill bet Biden had Navalny killed too for the same reason /s

“I’m not going to speculate but here is the most wild and unfounded bit of speculation I can think of…”

"That's the problem with speculation (...)", which is: it's used to discredit the most plausible explanations.

It's poisoning the well when others are arguing in good faith with reasonable explanations.

Still waiting for Epstein...

Seriously though, I've watched way too many movies where there is a staged suicide to not be biased against a story like this.

There is no way we'll ever know what happened unless there is a trial with a lot of non circumstantial evidence presented.

How would a nation state "thrive" on assassinating this person?

May I ask if you live in the U.S.? I have the impression that a lot of people there think that other nations revolve around destroying the U.S.

I'm definitely not saying that's what happened here (I find it highly unlikely), but if a nation state did do that, there could be a desire to sow additional mistrust of a major US company.

Edit: this is just because someone asked what a hypothetical motive could be

There are a lot of reports of Putin actively interfering to destabilize the west, and also reports in places like the NYTs about the US expanding bases in Ukraine to provoke Russia into the war. These aren’t Twitter rants, they’re in our mainstream “big” media outlets.

World leaders have way too much on their plate to be personally involved in assassinating random foreign citizens for high-degree political effects.

If you see this headline, and story, and immediately think of Putin, that is an unhealthy level of conspiratorial thinking. There is literally no evidence to support this line.

I don't think anyone actually believes Putin personally organises many individual operations in foreign countries. You're just getting hung up on a common shortcut: "Putin" means "someone under Putin's (not even direct) command" here.

This is a niche, US specific issue. Assassinations expose agents that take years to plant. If Russia wanted to get involved, they would honey trap executives, hack them, etc.

Getting involved at this low level is absurd.

It’s like finding a Turd on you lawn, and claiming it’s part of a Russian Plot.

"The problem with speculation is" that i'ts used to discredit the most plausible explanations.

Ah yes, a rival nation would want a whistleblower that brings bad press on their rival to be silenced right before further hearings. Funny how that works out in Boeing's favor more than anyone else.

> Or killed by a nation state that thrives on creating conflict

This just a wildly fanciful excuse, it has never happened in American soil.

oh wait, you mean the CIA?

Somehow, most people fail to see the obvious: The ongoing FAA audits at both, Spirit Aerospace and Boeing (so far it looks horrible based on initial reporting) will identify each and every single verifiable whistleblower claim anyways.

So no, despite the general retaliation against whistleblowers out of princial (for the record, that alone is illegal and should be punished a lot harder and more often), Boeing as a company or individual employees have nothing to gain here.

Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.

Why do you think this FAA audit will not be corrupted?

To come down to the general quality of discusion: reasons.

On a more serious note: Reporting states that Boeing and Spirit failed a third of their audits, so there is that. Also, FAA stopped Boeing from expanding their 737 MAX capacity. Also also, EASA can audit them as well (and very well might, deoending on what findings the FAA audits have; same as the FAA can audit Airbus in Europe).

But hey, if you think up even bigger, broader and deeper conspiracies necessary to make the initial obe believable, I cannot help you, or anyone.

Not the first time I think about quitting this place, for a couple of months now, discussion quality ain't any better than then comment section of my local newspaper. And thus really not worth the time.

Judging by the comment thread here, I believe discussions on HN would improve if you follow thru and stick to your local newspaper.

Upvote for the “also also” statement

Here’s a question for you: why do we punish people who have already committed a crime?

As a deterrence. This may as well be making an example of a whistleblower to signal potential future whistleblowers to stay silent.

That's the whole point. And the reason why retaliation against whistleblowers ia mostly illegal. Proving reprisal actions can be so difficult so that it amounts to retribution itself.

All the reason more to honor those few brave souls who do it, I know I propably wouldn't. And claiming this particular one was killed is absolutely not doing that.

>All the reason more to honor those few brave souls who do it, I know I propably wouldn't. And claiming this particular one was killed is absolutely not doing that.

What greater honor than to have Justice ultimately done, and the Truth be set free? My wager: Boeing council did everything they could to try to turn things around on him, and the poor bastard in that moment, exhausted, at mental wits end, believed them. My guess is the answer will be in the transcripts as long as Boeing doesn't get them redacted/sealed.

As long as our court system is tilted in the direction of those that can afford to more effectively fund gaslighting the populace, we'll continue to see tragedies like this.

> Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.

You could have just made your point; you didn't have to end it with "everyone is dumb except me"

> Funny how a place full of rather smart, educated and curious people like HN collectively fail to see that one, very simple, fact.

I found it even funnier that this can be said about your post.

The thing about being a very rational person like this, is that you're very easy to manipulate.

? I don't get your remark

I think he's saying that you're too willing to believe the reasonable, plausible explanation that falls out of Occam's Razor, as opposed to accepting whatever embattled fringe theory of the day also fits the available evidence.

It is almost like Occam's Razor proposes some type of probability distribution, not discounting the fringe completely but suggesting as a heuristic that the most simple is most likely.

Some people though seem to like this Anti-Occam's Razor that the most complex and interesting explanation is most likely even though they have to know from everyday experience that is simply not true and not how the world works.

Said every conspiracy theorist ever.

>my coworkers, my bosses, the entire world, just does not care about doing the right thing.

I was pondering today about how the current economic condition of the populace incentivizes workers (everybody) to ignore moral concerns. If you saw something that really bothered you morally and were to blow the whistle and it hit the news cycle, you would never be able to work in your field again. You would probably get sued (legitimately or not). You could no longer provide for yourself or your family; probably for the rest of your life.

I worked at an immoral company; a small health insurance company that constantly weaseled out of paying claims. They even fired a new worker who had gotten in a car accident just so they wouldn't have to pay for it; the health insurance provided to employees was from the company's product line. They would always say, "we're not denying you care, we just aren't going to pay for it." One time a disgruntled customer or family member showed up with a gun to the office. This was decades ago and I did the only thing I felt I could do. I left when I could and I feel pretty good about it. They were eventually shut down by the state for not paying claims. I would have left earlier but I had rent and bills to pay. That's how modern economic conditions incentivize people to ignore moral concerns.

Long story short, if you feel you are working at a company that forces you to ignore moral concerns and you can't overcome it, work towards getting the fuck out as soon as you can financially.

Is the political safety of the United States on the same level as that of Russia?

No, even if this were murder.

If the people investigating Hunter Biden suddenly turned up dead, or the people investigating Trump, and if that happened over and over across several years, then I'd say yes. Oh, and if you could be arrested for a protest.

You can be arrested for a protest. You can also be shot and killed without consequences for protesting in some scenarios. Whether either of these survive a SCOTUS challenge, not sure, but in the meantime it sure fucking happens. We’re less free in 2024 than we were in 2001.

But at least you’re still right about the political assassinations, which is not yet a thing that happens here on an organized basis.

You could be shot for protesting in the US well before 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings .

There's some nasty shades of Karen Silkwood with this story.

I always check whether my flight is on a Boeing and tend to avoid them—better safe than sorry! Fortunately, in Europe, most carriers primarily use Airbus, which simplifies things. Essentially, it boils down to avoiding Ryanair, and there are plenty of other good reasons for avoiding Ryanair.

My favorite thing to avoid Ryanair is, despit being most used in Europe, they never had a single deadly crash. not even once. So it's great reason to avoid actually. too safe? I prefer less safe airlines like germanwings? or maybe any other with actual crash history. Also some leg room is more important than my safety. you know?

Is it me or the "apparent" in the title implies it looks like a suicide but is not conclusively one?

I doubt the police investigation is over, and a coroner report certainly isn't done, so there isn't an official cause of death yet.

Coroners are pretty low-budget compromise targets compared to lizards.

If you can zero someone about to testify in Congress, you can also coerce a coroner to say whatever you want.

cod develops over time, from an enforcement perspective, a rapid assesment of the situation may lead to a level of response based on perceived threat.

an experienced or well trained LEO may see a subtle detail indicating involvement, or not of other person, setting the tone for investigation or threat response.

an autopsy may turn that around if it ends up that a weapon was held in a position quite unlikely for decedent to achieve.

the overarching consideration is a planned murder is not in any way beneficial to boeings situation

a couple of experienced highly muscled guys could use force to make it look that way.

same deal as saying "alleged", they'll use such wording until something is officially determined or so on.

(this comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674829 but we merged that thread hither)

It's probably worth remembering that there is a tremendous amount of political pressure on the coroner and prosecutors dealing with this to not leave behind an unsolved murder finding that could sully the reputation of the entire system for giving congress a chance of hearing testimony from whistleblowers.

So anything short off enough evidence to secure an quick conviction of some disposable culprit will we bend into whatever shape is needed to support an "suicide" or "accidental death" finding by the prosecutor/coroner in charge regardless of what the investigating detective think is the most likely explanation.

Well, I flew once on a 787 Dreamliner and we had to wait around 2 hours, because restarting a system, waiting for experts to arrive, took that much time. At least that was what the pilot told us.

I'm not saying that Boeing had him assassinated, but I sure wouldn't put it past them. They've already shown themselves to be perfectly willing to sacrifice human lives for increased profits.

It wouldn't be as direct as if the order came from the boardroom. There are thousands of "stakeholders" bound to lose their gravy train, lobbyists, suppliers, "consultants", military industrial complex. It's easy to for one of these to send a "contractor" to stalk, hold the person's arm and "shoot himself" dead. I am not an investigator but this is very very suspicious. He delivered 2 days of testimony and is about to third one. If someone is suicidal they wouldn't be this motivated to go through the testimony of 2 days and skip the third. Also suspicious is BBC becoming "the owner of the stories" instead of local news outlets.The PR machine is in full swing.

So what you’re saying is Boeing has an army of 2000 lobbyists are all ready to kill for financial gain?

There are a lot of shady people involved in the military industry.

Why all, when one would do?

No, only one of the thousands needs to be willing to go that far. The power of stochastic terrorism...

No, he's saying that there's an army of lobbyists that see Boeing's financial health as necessary for their (clients') own. The lobbyists don't work for Boeing.

Imagine you had a highly lucrative SMB selling Microsoft services to some government/institutional customers, and some big court case threatened to cause MS serious harm, affecting your ability to sell those MS services. If you're a sociopath, you might want to shoot the star witness.

Boeing, a defense contractor, relies on killing people for financial gain.

Killing for financial gain is literally the business model of a large branch of Boeing.

It doesn't even have to be Boeing. It's possible that a government agency could do it as well. For example, suppose Boeing is seen by the government as a national entity, it's possible for a government agency such as CIA to do the assignation if they think he puts the country in an unfavorable position.

But I think it's more likely that a shareholder/high stakes person connected to Boeing might want to do it.

There is no way Boeing, the company, would do it in my opinion. That would be nuts.

Doesn't even have to be someone important or with a lot of money on the line, just anyone with a lot on the line for them, and that doesn't require anything but a feeling.

A janitor who thinks they will lose their job which might be no money but critical (or feel critical) to them because of retirement or health care, maybe for a relative etc, or any rando that some nobody middle manager lizard pressured or even merely manipulated by just talking.

Don't forget the US government was spying on the French to get Airbus commercial contract details for Boeing.

There is no way Boeing, the company, would disparage the long-earned reputation in order to save some money and with the risk of people dying.

-- would have said someone a few years ago

> There is no way Boeing, the company, would do it in my opinion. That would be nuts.

What does it mean for Boeing, the company, to have done it or not?

Boeing is a large corporation comprised of individuals and assets. If foul play was involved, how many of these individuals would it take to be considered that Boeing carried out the murder? Would they need to have used company assets? Would it need to have come down the chain of command?

As the expression goes, "the most interesting explanation is probably the best one".

If I were a large Boeing shareholder I could protect my stock value and give Boeing cover at the same time since they would be legitimately innocent of his "suicide".

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/052116/top-3-...

There's a fairly short list of companies I could see doing something like this, and Boeing is on that list. I could see Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey, ...

Corporate serial killers are everywhere really. The tobacco industry knew their product was giving people cancer and tried to hide that from the people they were poisoning. Philips knew their CPAP machines were filling people's lungs with poison and killing them but hid that as long as they could so they could sell more machines. Baby food companies like Gerber and Beech-Nut Nutrition knew/know that their baby food contains dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals but continued to sell them to parents who unknowingly spooned that poison right into the mouths of their babies. DuPont and 3M knew that the PFOA and PFOS they produced were highly toxic and causing everything from cancer to deformed babies but they lied to cover that up so that they could keep profiting and now every single one of us has that shit in our blood and there is literally no place or creature on earth that isn't contaminated with it. It's in the rainwater. Johnson & Johnson knew for decades about the asbestos in their baby powder. The Sackler Family knew they were pushing dangerous levels of opioids, but they lied and even bribed doctors to overprescribe their products leading to millions of deaths and countless addictions. Car manufacturers have killed people for higher profits too.

Every single one of these companies were already pulling in a massive amount of wealth but they knowingly killed people just so that they could make even more money. They all put additional profits over human lives. There is no reason to think they wouldn't put a bullet into someone's head if they thought it would make them more money. In many cases it would have been much more humane if they had.

Do you have more information about Gerber and Beech-Nut Nutrition contamination? My baby eats Beech-Nut baby food.

I'm really sorry to hear that. There were a few internet articles and even two congressional reports on the problem showing that both the baby food companies and the FDA knew about unsafe levels of heavy metals, but did not address it.

https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversig...

In light of the scandal the FDA started a "Closer to Zero" program (https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/clo...) because I guess zero poison in baby food is asking too much. The website shows that the FDA hasn't continued to outright ignore the problem at least, but you can see that they haven't come close to doing anything meaningful in terms of action levels and don't expect to until Dec 2024.

In the meantime, high levels of heavy metals are still being found in baby food sold in stores: https://www.consumerreports.org/babies-kids/baby-food/are-he...

There are ongoing calls for the FDA to step in and do more (https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2024/attorney-general-james-...) and there are lawsuits in the works (https://www.wisnerbaum.com/blog/2024/january/appeals-court-r...) that you might want to check into since your child could be being hurt.

Some foods are worse than others (rice is a common culprit) so if you're stuck using any kind of baby food off the shelf you might be able to reduce exposure if you're careful about what you buy, but I wouldn't have much confidence in any of it. Once a company has proven that they're willing to poison babies for profit trust shouldn't come easy.

I'm sorry that I was the one to tell you about this, but I'm really glad that you now know and if beech-nut has been hurting your kid I hope the damage done is small and that you're able to get some kind of compensation for the harm they've caused your family. Until companies know that they'll face significant and meaningful consequences if they knowingly hurt us for profit they'll never stop hurting us.

I imagine this is going to further the terrible safety culture at Boeing

When “Death by MBA” takes an unexpectedly sinister meaning.

Her cared too much and clearly it was too much to bear. I wonder how many friendships from former Boeing colleagues he lost because of this.

What a strange article.

- whistleblower dies

Blablabla

- self inflicted wound

Blablabla

- he was bound to testify the next day

Blablabla

- he was found dead in his truck in a parking lot

It sounds like the journalist thinks it was murder but can’t write it cause it’s illegal somehow. The result is a piece that almost reads like a satyrical piece from the Onion.

And, like clockwork, it's at the top of the /r/nottheonion sub:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1bcfceq/boeing...

Ha, I didn't know that subreddit. Thanks

It's not illegal to speculate, but it's good journalism not to. They reported on the known facts only and that's great.

Can you imagine someone adding "this suspiciously looks like a murder" with nothing to back it? Even shitty tabloids don't do that.

Sorry, you're right, I didn't convey what I felt properly. It feels that the journalist is trying way too hard not to make it sound like it was suspicious. So he scatters the facts around the article as if people wouldn't connect the dots.

> It sounds like the journalist thinks it was murder but can’t write it

It sounds like a basic and uncontroversial recitation of the facts. People here project their own psychology (and cultural imprints courtesy of Hollywood) onto it, with high cynicism and distrust that extends not just to Boeing but to authority figures in general (police, courts).

Otherwise this thread would be about HNers' experience with whistleblowing and suicidal thoughts, which is all the story actually mentions.

I wish there were an aggressively anti-clickbait news outlet that writes headlines explicitly designed to preempt and neutralize potential misunderstandings. Imagine editors try to anticipate all kinds of ways a candidate headline might mislead the reader, and rewrite the headline to discourage those inferences — succinctly if possible, verbosely if necessary. For this particular piece such a outlet might opt for something like:

"Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility Dies by Apparent Suicide"

or even:

"Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility — Distinct from the 737 Max Whistleblower! — Dies by Apparent Suicide"

To be clear, I don't find the headline by The Hill ("Key Boeing Whistleblower Found Dead from Apparent Suicide") to be especially misleading or clickbaity. It's perfectly defensible against charges of intentional misleadingness. But I suspect for many readers it is part of the experience of reading this article to have a moment of realization halfway through to the effect of "Ah, so this is not about the 737 Max whistleblower I've recently read about". What a breath of fresh air it'd be to have a news outlet that immediately gives off an impression of honorableness by trying actively and aggressively to avoid misleading its reader by its headlines (rather than focus on how its headlines can be defended from charges of misleadingness)!

https://www.boringreport.org/ is actually pretty good at that. I've been reading it for some time. It's LLM generated I think

Wow, thank you!

Edit: for those who, like me, missed the HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35905437

I have it on my phone too, but its app is just horribly frustrating. I'm back to reading Google News. If you could give me a news feed chstomized for me, with LLM neutered titles and summaries, I might just pay money for that: but that feed would have to be octaves above what Google News has. Think TikTok-level of recommendation quality.

737 Max whistleblowers should take notice though.

Whistleblowers should be in no way influenced by current events. Information wants to be free and that will never change.

They still could decide to be more careful.

Information may want to be free, but most people also want to live.

America has historically been home to people willing to sacrifice their lives for liberty, transparency, etc.

“Give me liberty or give me death” and all that.

One wants to have perspectives of change even in sacrifice. Cant imagine actual change with any given party or political conestellation atm

How about "Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility Dies by Apparent Suicide in the middle of formal deposition which started last week"

That sounds like he died while in the court room while giving testimony.

Right, it sounds like they were in the court room since a week and the guy couldn't take it anymore.

"Ex-Boeing Employee Who Reported Safety Issues in 2019 at South Carolina Facility Dies by Apparent Suicide just before his court appearance on Saturday"

"middle of formal deposition for his civil retaliation case"

Reddit, r/savedyouaclick

Try https://ground.news

Whether it was actually a suicide or murder, this (suing a large organization) is not the kind of thing an individual should take on alone. We are fragile. We can hurt ourselves, and others can hurt us. Without a companion keeping him company and supporting him, either path to harm is too easy.

"Died from self-inflicted wounds" - Isn't there a word called "suicide" for this thing?

No, not necessarily. At least according to Wikipedia, suicide is the act of _intentionally_ taking one’s own life. [1] It seems that the legal definition, at least in some jurisdictions, aligns. [2] If you find someone has died from self-inflicted wounds, it may be ruled suicide or accident. The colloquial use of suicide may also include accidental suicide, which could introduce confusion.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide

[2] https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=2057

zero evidence of foul play but, who needs evidence...

The amount of conspiracie flying around in this thread are shocking. Someone committed, as it seems, suicide after years, if not decades, of emotional work related stress. They came forward, publicly, with their concerns. So publicly, that everyone knows who they are, from co-workers over friends and family to the media. That alone adds another ton of stress and pressure. And on top of all of that, they went through a full day of deposition, aka interrogation, and looked at yet, at bare minimum, another day of those.

Each single factor mention above can, and did, cause people to commit suicide. And instead of focusing on this, and the fact that a very courageous person with high ethnical standards, is dead (I know that I would not have the courage to come forward the way they did in all likelyhood, and if I did, or didn't, I would be in serious emotional and psychological trouble), the self-proclaimed smart HN crowd is thrwong stuff around like "that's what corporate securits is there for" or "it could have been a government agency".

Two things:

First, for fucks sake, start showing some compassion, not just here but also on other subjects were someone weaker or more vulnerable suffers. The lack of emotional intelligence is the world into a colder place that already is and has to be.

Second, stop this jumping to conclusion behaviour, whether it is concerning on-going investigation or stories like, it onpy leads to very wrong conclussions or out right conspiracy theories. Both are embarrassing and expose a lack of curiosity. And no, just because some of the BS theories being thrown around stick sometines, doesn't mean all do, or that this way of thinking is working. It just measn that if enough theories are thrown to the wall, by sheer volume, some will stick. Just luck. And we should hold ourselves to higher standards around here, especially in cases of human tragedies.

The man was just about to testify. The timing is what makes this suspicious, not the suicide itself.

Let's not be so naive as to imply that these companies and their vested interests would not murder someone to protect a multi-billion dollar business. Shit like this happens all the time.

All the time, huh? Not the usual lawyer intimidation, pressure and PI surveillenace, but actual murder?

Ok, can you link to cases then? In the US or Europe or some place like this, not Africa or some developing country where western companies run amok at times. And also some recent ones, in the last 20 years or so?

Okay.

- Jeffrey Epstein (2019, US): no explanation needed.

- Michael Hastings (2013, USA): Journalist known for his critical reporting on the US military, died in a car crash consistent with a car cyberattack (maximum speed/brake tampering, body charred beyond recognition) amidst national security investigations he was involved in. Expressed concerns his car had been tampered with and that he was being targeted hours before his death.

- Alexander Perepilichnyy (2012, UK): Exposed a Kremlin-linked fraud scheme, died under mysterious circumstances while jogging in England shortly after.

- David Kelly (2003, UK): A British weapons expert embroiled in controversy over the UK government's Iraq war intelligence. Suicided two days after testifying in a forest outside his home.

- Gary Webb (2004, USA): Investigative journalist who exposed the CIA's connections to drug trafficking, died from two gunshot wounds to the head in what was ruled a suicide.

- Deborah Jeane Palfrey (2008, USA): aka the "DC Madam," operated an escort service, threatened to expose high-profile clients, was found hanged right before she could testify in court. Notably, she said publicly multiple times that she would never commit suicide. One of the girls under her employ was also suicided by hanging.

On a related note, Alexander Litvenenko's death from polonium poisoning. If the Kremlin agents had handled the polonium with more care and not left a radiation trail a blind man could follow, it would have been a case of mysterious deterioration and a tragedy but not a murder.

The GCHQ guy found in a bag in his home

I bet you believe Epstein killed himself too.

Unless we have credible claims, or investigations, showing otherwise, I am in deed inclined to.

Is there a pattern? This seems to happen way too often in western corporations.

(Here's another example, could give you many more: Suicide of VW whistleblower in 2020: https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen-verbrauche... - use Google Translate).

Many many people commit suicide in western countries. That’s the pattern imo.

I’m guessing the stress of pointing the finger at the company and people you’ve worked for and with for 30 years is not insignificant.

Many many people also commit suicide in eastern countries as well, quite often at much higher rates than in western countries.

Why the 'western' qualifier?

Is this the one where corporate Tilda Swinton hires contract killers to get rid of the whistleblowers and George Clooney figures it out?

edit: Michael Clayton was the title

Eisenhower warned the American public about the military-industrial complex before he left office. We are reaping the consequences of private/public partnerships and crony capitalism.

Only time will tell if it truly was suicide or a cover up.

Will it really?

Yes, if humans eventually invent a machine that uses wormholes to look back in time to see historical events.

I don't buy the foul play theories. What could this person possibly reveal that is worse that has already come out? They crashed two 737 Max's full of passengers for crying out loud.

Post truth reality isn't about buying anything, it's about viiiiibes maaaaaan!

Names. Criminal charges require heads to fall on to pierce the corporate veil. He had names. Likely dates too. He had evidence of them committing acts that carry prison terms which would not by any stretch be short.

He was the number one threat to everyone at that company at that time, that was complicit in cutting corners.

Hm, this thread once again slid down the top page at an alarming rate, even though the safety of the environment surrounding engineers is a serious concern of engineers. Hacker News is surprisingly dismissive of user interests and votes.

Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.

Are you surprised about the lack of curiosity on this sort of case? When many here are within 2 degrees of the people involved. Most within 3 degrees. It's a small world

Number of comments and upvotes doesn't suggest lack of curiosity... It's the fact that it got bumped off front page

> Number of comments and upvotes doesn't suggest lack of curiosity

Yes, I agree with you. I was doing double speak. Many things of public interest are nudged "off the front page". Promoting Political Bread & Circuses instead. I think the networks of the Managerial Class are tight. Due to shared interests, values, & upbringing. So I'm not surprised to see the circling of wagons. I'm more surprised that this post was not flagged yet.

For those who care, none of this has anything to do with how we moderate HN. I just put the story back on the frontpage - I hadn't seen it earlier.

Users have now expressed interest totaling over 350 points in several hours.

> Are you surprised about the lack of curiosity on this sort of case?

I don't think it's a matter of curiosity. If most of the comments in this thread were things like the history of corporate violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...) then I think there would be less downvotes. Few people are aware of corporate oppression of the past which robs people of context for the present.

Unfortunately rather than provoking curiosity by introducing people to information they didn't know they didn't know, most of the comments here are some form of "in the back of the head twice..." which just isn't interesting or thought provoking.

I would not be surprised if dang wants to quietly get rid of this kind of topics. It is risky. It is a lot safer to criticize a president TBH.

Let's see if you still feel that way in 5 minutes.

Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass.

"Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with just enough randomness to be confusing.

Thanks dang, sorry for thinking like that.

A few points to keep in mind:

- Little of HN's moderation is done directly by moderators. Rather it's user actions (flags on stories, downvotes and flags on comments), and some automated mechanisms, most especially the "flamewar detector".

- HN detects flames where a story has > 40 comments and the ratio of comments to votes is greater than one. As I write this comment, the story has a ratio of 2.24:1, which is quite high. The average front-page story floats far closer to 0.55 to 0.60 (2021 & 2022, respectively, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926236>, based on my own analysis of all HN front-page archives).

(At some point I'd looked at all the "spiciest" HN stories in the front-page archive, and though I don't have that handy, a 2.24 ratio is remarkably high by comparison.)

The flamewar detector isn't perfect, but it's often appropriate, and can take what seems to be an otherwise interesting story off HN's front page quite quickly. I've seen this happen to a number of my own submissions, and until I understood the mechansism and cause (and inquired to the mods via email) it could be quite discouraging. Note that mods do occasionally override the metric (as they have in this case, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676385>).

Ironically, your best defence against the flamewar detector is to upvote the story and not comment on it.

- The story is of course possibly significant, but we've got very little information to go on presently. HN, as with other online discussion sites, has a tendency to go off half-cocked in such cases, often with regrettable results in terms of discussion accuracy or relevance. My suggestion is to absorb the report, keep it in mind, suspend judgement as to what you think may have happened, and look for further investigations or reports.

Honestly you're probably better off reading threads on reddit about it. The system may not be as elite as HN but it does allow for more attention and free speech IF you're willing to dig through the detritus.

So sad he's dead :(

It's infuriating all these untimely deaths.

Avowed Bayesian's usually leave the room the moment they sense a conspiracy tag coming. It is a very narrow, domain specific tool for analysis.

Notably, statistics has again and again shown that Bayesian statistics is archaic and not useful in actual production systems.

Slightly better probability calculations aren’t worth losing most of the stats tools we utilize all the time. This is why Bayesian techniques has precisely zero influence in Generative AI/LLMs

"A self-inflicted head wound", uh? Like a strong blow on the back of the head maybe? Or two bullets in the brain? Has he been Epstein'ed?

I hope the company had no involvement in this. It would be bit futile given such a large audience has seen their employees state they won't fly in the aircraft they build. [1] 3,716,935 views 4 days ago and Blancolirio's assorted incident reports [2]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc [video][32 mins][john oliver]

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/@blancolirio/search?query=boeing

Yeah, doing something so drastic in this situation doesn’t make sense. It’s possible that reality is somewhere in the middle. I have a very difficult time believing they would actually off the guy, but it’s not so difficult to believe they might hire some investigators to look for skeletons in his closet. Perhaps they found some. Obviously this is wild speculation and not intended to be a theory—just an example of something short of full-on Tom Clancy.

some people kill others because they run out of nutella, some kill others to rob $10 from their pockets, some kill them for fun, but its difficult to believe a giant corporation with A LOT to hide would kill a whistleblower?

Those are examples of irrational people doing things without regard to consequences. That’s not particularly relevant to what conditions would likely need to exist for a giant corporation to decide to do something like that. It would not be difficult to believe if this person had unique knowledge that likely would not come to light otherwise. Then I could see a rational (and terrible) person deciding that the benefit is worth the risk. It just wouldn’t make sense in this case. It’s not like this one guy was going to break Boeing substantially more than they’re already broken.

Irrational people exist in corporate structures too. The eBay death threat plot was completely irrational.

could be he had information that would be devastating to some specific higher-up individual

Billions of dollars at stake. There are countless interests that would absolutely kill someone over a fraction of that. I would never whistleblow. Losing my life isn't worth it

> It would be bit futile given such a large audience has seen their employees state they won't fly in the aircraft they build.

Perhaps not in this particular case. But it would be a strong deterrent against future would be whistleblowers.

And there it is [1] 'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower's prediction to family before death

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA44FFi95PA

Ahh, so this is how you protect government-endorsed monopolies worth trillions - shoot the messenger, literally.

Now this is getting better than television drama and intrigue!

Suicide by 3 shotguns blasts to the back of the head[1]. Many such cases with key witnesses.

[1] not actually what happened, but might as well have been.

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