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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

Historically companies have not shyed away from killing people for profit. Boeing is a very very well connected company, and it can barely be considered a truly private company to begin with anyway.

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Historically companies have absolutely shied away from killing people.

Has it happened, yes. Is it commonplace, absolutely not!

nobody considers Boeing a private company. It is publicly traded on the stock market.

Boeing is a private company in the sense that its stock is owned by private indviduals as opposed to entities like Amtrak, USPS, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc, which are companies that are owned by the government. That is it's a private sector company (vs public sector or government).

It's an admittedly weird overloading of the term "private company" but it's a useful thing to know about - usually context clues can help, but definitely gives me a pause when I encounter the term.

I agree contacts please help a lot, but in this case the context was someone that thinks companies casually murder people and that Boeing is de facto socially owned because of the influence that Boeing has. I'm not sure how oversized influence on government translates to citizen ownership, but asking for coherence is probably too much.

think using the full terms publicly/privately traded can help a lot in this area.

It's also worth noting that "killing people for profit" is not limited to murder: companies kill people all the time - rarely in the form of murder, less rarely in the form of homicide (think security and military contractors), commonly in the form of gross negligence, safety violations, and polution.

If someone thinks that building bombs or killing via pollution is evidence for homicide, they are making a gross category error. The former has very little bearing on the latter.

So now the US government is involved too :)

It seems the risks of murdering whistleblowers, especially after they have already testified, is too great. They just want revenge here?

Just pointing out, now these guys will never be on 60 minutes or giving interviews to popular mechanics, Rogan or Lex Friedman. Whatever testimony is made available will be all that we have on the topic.

And that is better for Boeing than people believing they were murdered by Boeing?

One guy killed himself and the other got MERSA. Only kooks believe that Boeing killed them!

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