Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
Also, let's not kid ourselves, even if Boeing doesn't retaliate (and there is a lot of reason to think they have), being a whistleblower adds a tremendous amount of stress & disruption to your life. Whatever your life expectancy was before you were a whistleblower was, it's going to be lower (likely MUCH lower) afterwards. It's a terrible price to pay, which is why they deserve as much protection & support as possible.
There was a whole court thing, he lost, and then he died aged 39 of a heart attack.
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/metric-...
Probably in imperial measures? Unless bananas were somehow sold in metric grams and the EU imposed some weird unit I don't know about.
> The prosecution of Sunderland greengrocer Steven Thoburn for selling bananas in imperial measures helped turn public opinion against the EU
Is it a troy pound, a tower pound, a london pound, a metric pound?
Also, he should have done what every supermarket does around here and sell bananas at a flat price per bunch.
To die of the stress caused by (indirectly) being enforced to use a 'new' measurement system must be one of the weirdest causes of deaths i have ever read about.
Let’s say both of the whistleblowers were age 50. The probability of a 50 year old man dying in a year is 0.6%. So the probability of 2 or more of them dying in a year is 1 - (the probability of exactly zero dying in a year + the probability of exactly one dying in a year). 1 - (A+B).
A is (1-0.006)^N. B is 0.006N(1-0.006)^(N-1). At 60 A is about 70% and B is about 25% making it statistically insignificant.
But they died in the same 2 month period, so that 0.006 should be 0.001. If you rerun the same calculation, it’s 356.
Characteristics like having spent a career building airplanes surrounded by all kinds of mechanical and chemical hazards.
Whistleblowing itself is extremely stressful for the attention it draws, the personal and professional relationships it strains, the media attention and of course the rampant speculation of assassination.
Does personal health influence the psychology of a whistleblower? If you get a terminal diagnosis would you be more likely to spill the beans?
On the other hand, the more variables you add the more variance you’ll get. Actuarial tables use deaths per 100k. To my knowledge there haven’t been 100k Boeing whistleblowers.
Yes, reality is complex and messy and confusing and we often don’t have data to describe it. That’s why it’s important to know when we are dealing with relevant facts and when we are constructing a spherical cow out of scraps in their absence.
This is some very specific, public, whistleblowers, in the span of months. Not some pool of thousands, or even hundreds people with mere "potential to criticize".
And here it also doesn't make any sense; the cat is out of the bag, there is nothing to cover up because we already know about Boeing being a clusterfuck. Killing anyone doesn't really make much difference.
"Surely it can't be coincidence", "corporations conspire", and vague references to "military industrial complex" are exceedingly poor arguments – actually they're not really arguments at all because you can say that sort of thing about almost anything.
Executives are the ones that have motivations, not the abstract entity of Corporation.
'Cat out of the bag' would be 'we have specific evidence that allows us to prosecute a specific executive for criminal negligence or manslaughter'. That would be why you might kill someone, to save your own skin.
Is there any reason to believe that either one of these men had any such evidence and had thus far not shared it?
We know about the results, when doors blow off and tires fall off. You don’t need a whistleblower to tell you that.
We know less about what’s happening internally. I think the relevant information is the extent to which Boeing knew about problems and what they did with that information.
That's literally what both of these guys already made public at different times about different facilities. Is there reason to think they had additional information that they just decided not to share?
Presidents are not assasinated, blackmail doesn't happen, whistleblowers are not hunted, persecuted and murders, union leaders aren't targetted, hush money are never involved, corporations don't lie and cover up crimes, the head of FBI never kept tabs on politicians and public figures for blackmail, prior-presidents never pay hush money to hookers or do shady business dealings, running-presidents and their sons never get bribed to promote business deals or cover up corruption, and nice sinecures on corporate boards never await ex-presidents and prominent politicians who catered to those corporations during their time in office.
The reason groups want to get rid of whistle blowers is two-fold. The first is to try to prevent on record testimony. But the second is to intimidate other whistle blowers. If you see some funkiness, even the sort leading to deaths, going on at Boeing right now, you're going to be thinking long and hard about these 'mysterious deaths.'
> "Surely it can't be coincidence", "corporations conspire", and vague references to "military industrial complex"...
That was a slick transformation, I wonder if anyone noticed.
> ...are exceedingly poor arguments – actually they're not really arguments at all because you can say that sort of thing about almost anything.
Were they presented as an argument, or merely as a factual observation?
The reality is that the top brass are NEVER held accountable for the kind of mistakes Boeing has been making. Even when it leads to deaths, the worst one of these guys can expect is to resign with only a 15 million dollar parachute.
If 32 died, ok, they're killing people. If 2/32 died, that's within the realm of possibility.
We can ballpark these odds relatively easily. Dean was 45 and Barnett was 62. Let's assume they are somewhat representative of the average whistleblower and the average whistleblower is in average health. Let's use the standard government actuarial tables[2] and assume the average age is 56 just to make the math easier since the odds of a single 56 year old dying in a given year is roughly 1%. The odds of at least 1 of the 32 dying would be 28% and the odds of 2 dying would be 4%. Unlikely enough to be suspicious, but not unlikely enough to be anything close to the smoking gun that some are suggesting.
[1] - https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
Boeing would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for us meddling hackers!
the deaths happened in two months. not in the space of a year. you need to take that in account.
If I asked you for the odds of the next three coin tosses being heads, you don't start counting on the first heads. The first toss being tails is a possible outcome that can't be ignored.
And for what it is worth, one of these deaths would be in the "suspicious" category and one wouldn't.
Also his isn't quite correct. John Barnett (first death) left Boeing in 2017 and his whistle blowing did not occur within the last 3 years. The 32 complaints stat is for the last 3 years.
Also it's not even clear if the most recent death (Josh Dean) would be included in those stats. He worked for Spirit and claims that he reported improperly drilled holes in the 737 Max fuselage and that nothing was done. The claim would probably be against Spirit not Boeing. It's being reported in the media as Boeing, but in paperwork it would probably be against Spirit.
The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...
I don’t really have a strong opinion on this particular instance one way or another. It seems unlikely to me that even Boeing is like hiring hitman to whack people and make it look like suicide, and that seems much more unlikely than a guy who was about to commit suicide saying he wasn’t going to make it look that way.
But also, it is not impossible. People have undoubtedly killed for a lot less money than what this stuff is costing Boeing.
Or sometimes to attack the people who made their lives extremely stressful. Or someone who works for them. Or commit arson. But somehow that's not what we are observing
I really have no idea. I just don’t think we can say definitively that he didn’t kill himself because he said he would not.
The wisleblower of a worldwide famous controversial airplane company didn't seem suicidal or depressed, and then he says if he hits the news that he commuted suicide it's not.
That's 2 completely different situations that you can't really compare.
I wasn’t equating the two, just pointing out that suicidal people are not in their right mind and thus their word cannot be taken at face value. Perhaps he did the sequence of events we’re discussing specifically so that we’d be saying it can’t be suicide. He was, after all, trying to take Beoing down right? Maybe he viewed it as a worthy way to give his life.
I’m not saying that’s the case, I surely have no idea, just that it very well could be.
People that commit suicide is because they stopped caring about their life. They won't have any side goals for their death, they won't care about taking down a company. Especially not if that covers up the truth of them being fed up with this world which would be the only message they would want to leave behind.
If someone really wants to take a company down, they would do stuff for that, not commit suicide with the idea that you might have blamed them for it without having assurance, and with the risk of being remembered as someone who faked their suicide in order to harm a company. It just really doesn't make logical sense to me.
This game of telephone is absurd.
His family has said no such thing. A proclaimed "friend of the family" claimed he told her this.
it's not exactly a smoking gun but you can't blame the guy's age, either. 45 is just middle age, I hope
Combined with the suicide two months ago (with his prior warning "please don't believe that I committed suicide") this deserves an investigation, not a simple dismissal.
Assassinations of corporate whistleblowers also falls under the category of "it's rare but it happens."
I imagine Boeing can do anything a local tree-cutting service can do.
> And they weren't just accused of negligent business practice, they were accused of human trafficking and theft. They murdered a whistleblower to keep themselves out of jail, not to protect share prices.
Boeing execs are accused of committing massive fraud which endangered the lives of thousands, as well as other crimes to cover up the safety issues. They are currently under criminal investigation, with many individuals facing possible jail time. When people say corporate assassination, they mean people working for a corporation orchestrate the death of a person for reasons associated with the corporation.
You claimed no corporation had killed a whistleblower in 100 years. I gave an example of a corporation killing a whistleblower from the past 5 years. I don't know how I could have possibly addressed that point more clearly.
You subsequently made a "no true Scotsman" argument that this example of a corporation killing a whistleblower doesn't count, I argued the opposite. Even if we ignored this example, that would not make the statement "no otherwise legitimate corporation has ever killed a whistleblower" true. I'm not going to go through the effort of producing more evidence when what I have already presented proves my point, but that does not mean the example I provided was the only instance of such an occurrence.
> Secondly, this tree-cutting service was run by two people who were caught. Boeing could not possibly pull of a murder-for-hire conspiracy without leaking. They can't pull off a skip-a-few-bolts-to-save-money conspiracy without leaking.
So your argument is that they couldn't have committed a crime since they have been caught conspiring to commit too many crimes already? Absurd. For starters, just because they haven't been caught yet doesn't mean they won't be later. Then it does not stand to reason that a massive conspiracy to bypass safety regulations involving countless employees and multiple facilities is easier to keep secret than the clandestine actions of a small number of people or even perhaps a single person.
> And again, I ask what would they possibly be trying to accomplish by murdering people who's story is already told? What in the absolute world would they get out of murdering someone from a supplier while half the world thinks they just murdered someone else? They would be committing corporate suicide over cases they would probably be able to settle out of.
Again, multiple people at Boeing are facing criminal prosecution based primarily on the testimony of this whistleblower and others like him. If whistleblowers don't testify, they don't go to jail. The corporation would be able to settle, but the specific execs involved would not.
Why would anyone commit murder if they know they could be caught? And yet, murders occur, and murderers get caught. Hell, why would an aircraft company commit a skip-a-few-bolts-to-save-money plot if they could be caught? Obviously they take the risk that they can get away with it. Sure two whistleblowers dead in two months looks sketchy, but not one person has actually been accused of anything. Even if 5 more whistleblowers died in the next 24 hours, all found with gunshots to the back of the head, it wouldn't on its own be enough evidence to finger any particular person for the crime. And even if someone were caught, that doesn't necessarily mean every co-conspirator would be. If faced with a choice between guaranteed jail time for a crime someone is about to testify you committed versus a non-zero chance of getting away scot-free, many people would choose the latter.
And Boeing is accused of far worse, hundreds of people have died.
If a whistleblower has proof that a some executive has personally ordered to put into service a dangerous product, knowing full well that it will kill people? That's jailtime.
That's just due to what is happening to health care in this country.
The underlying cause is the same short-term-profits capitalism that has fucked over Boeing.
The conspiracy is just the trivial one that requires only perverse economic incentives and not assassination.
I mean just the other day, the emergency slide fell off a Boeing aircraft and landed essentially, in the backyard of the lawyer suing Boeing. Lol
I am p sure noone has been saying the designes of the aircrafts are fundamentally unsafe and a risk. It's always been a problem of negligence and lack of security culture, which maintenance problems fall under.
It's a bit more than just "OMG BOEING PLANES FALLING APART" clickbait. Lol.
It's the universe fucking with us.
A month later another whistleblower who was in good health dies suddenly and unexpectedly.
I don't think it's surprising to think that this combination of events is extremely unlikely.
I mean if I had dedicated my life to taking Boeing down and was contemplating suicide, I'd consider saying that too.
And especially you wouldn't cover up your suicide. You wouldn't want to lie to your family about the cause of your dead just to get back at some company you worked for.
I don't think this is a good theory. I don't see the logic in that. Much more logical if he was assassinated because he was spreading info that people with big money didn't want out.
You may be totally healthy and the peak of physical fitness and a sudden stroke destroys you. Everyone can improve their chances, but no-one can guarantee they're indestructible.
That's extremely tautological.
> it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
It's surprising they have so many whistle blowers that more than one has died in a short span of time, in particular, before the investigations over their allegations have been satisfactorily and publicly completed.
> and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
That doesn't mean it's pointless to ask questions and to investigate further. There's a lot of people who seem very eager for this all to just "go away." That should make anyone, let alone a forum of hackers, somewhat suspicious.
> With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues
So many? Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
No. It happens every day. Yes, if you pick two random middle-aged people at random, it's exceedingly rare for both of them to die without warning. However, if you pick a large population of otherwise healthy middle-aged people, the probably that two of them might die without warning is actually quite high.
The question is, how large is the population? If the union is to be believed (and there's a lot of credibility there), Boeing whistleblowers are a pretty large population. Add in to that the stress & disruption of being a whistleblower, and then layer on the stress from any retaliation from Boeing (which allegedly is happening on a daily basis), and the probability of two of them dying around the same time isn't really that low.
e.g., if you assume a mortality rate of 1 in 1000/yr (which seems very low, considering their circumstance) and a population of 100, the odds of two of them dying over the course of a year is over 50% (1-0.999^100)^2 = 53.29%.
Mental health is health. Age and physical health are factors that can effect mental health, particularly when someone is under tremendous amounts of stress. Their age and health could very well have something to do with their death.
The answer is there being at least (so this value includes all possible values >= 2) 2 deaths in a population of 100 with a rate of 1 in 1000, would be 0.464%.
(given a pool of 100, not even 32!)
Try looking at the cumulative probability for P(X>=2) when you manipulate the numbers a bit. Even if you just change the base probability of mortality to 1%, it jumps to 26% chance. If you restrict the population to 32 people, the threshold for it be more likely to happen than not is a 5.2% chance of death.
Plugging that in the binomial calculator, P(X>=2) at 32 trials is... 0.09%!! Astronomically low odds.
And you are right, their deaths are certainly not independent :)
---
Probability = 0.01
Number of Trials = 32
Number of Successes = 2
Now you look at cumulative probability (P X>=2) = 4%
---
You are correct that if bump the chances up to an annual 5.2% of death, then finally it starts becoming reasonably probable. So, for contrast, whistle blowers at Boeing seem to have approximately the same survival rate as somebody diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.
First, otherwise healthy people don't just die from stress. Stress can sometimes exacerbate underlying health issues and lead to a long, downward spiral in health that can result in death, but it does not happen in a matter of just weeks or a couple months. It also does not happen in people without underlying health issues.
Second, while a mortality rate of 0.001/yr is reasonable for middle-aged men, that assumes we know nothing about them or their deaths—that isn't the case here. John Barnett's death was a suicide. According to the CDC, there were 14,668 suicides in the 45–64 age group in 2021. The 2020 census shows that there are 85 million people in the US in that same age group. The suicide mortality rate comes out to 0.00017, which is about an order of magnitude lower than your estimate. Josh Dean was otherwise healthy from what's being reported. Given his age and state of health, his 1-year mortality rate is also likely substantially lower than your estimate
First, there's a difference between being "otherwise healthy" and appearing to be "otherwise healthy". People who seem otherwise healthy but under a tremendous amount of stress are absolutely more likely to die from a sudden heart attack or stroke. People who seem otherwise healthy but under a tremendous amount of stress are absolutely more likely to commit suicide. People who seem otherwise healthy but under a tremendous amount of stress are absolutely more likely to be in a car accident...
> Second, while a mortality rate of 0.001/yr is reasonable for middle-aged men, that assumes we know nothing about them or their deaths—that isn't the case here. John Barnett's death was a suicide. According to the CDC, there were 14,668 suicides in the 45–64 age group in 2021. The 2020 census shows that there are 85 million people in the US in that same age group. The suicide mortality rate comes out to 0.00017, which is about an order of magnitude lower than your estimate. Josh Dean was otherwise healthy from what's being reported. Given his age and state of health, his 1-year mortality rate is also likely substantially lower than your estimate
I don't agree that John Barnett's death was as likely to occur as anyone else in that age group. He was almost certainly experiencing stress above the level of the top percentile of the 45-64 population. The mean likelihood of suicide mortality isn't representative of his risk condition.
But you're right, if you narrow it down to the specifics of the deaths, you can absolutely reduce the probability to ridiculously low percentages. Like throw in the day of the week that they died, the hour of the day, the use of a gun, the specific gun used, etc. Does that really reduce the chances that they died though?
The chance they died is 100%. The question we're asking is what are the odds we'd be talking about their death. If it had been a different day of the week or a different model of gun, that would not have an influence. If the cause of death were different, it would. No one would be talking about foul play had he died of say a long term chronic condition, or cancer, or a natural disaster. The odds of dying under suspicious circumstances are inherently less than the odds of just dying in general.
There you go. Because it is after the fact, it's a given. It's not surprising that you can find a connection of some kind between them after the fact. Just because you can, after the fact, draw the connection, doesn't change the probability that they are dead.
And that is quite irrelevant to the question of what are the odds either of them, in isolation, would die under suspicious circumstances.
...and of course, people have said this about whistleblowers and witnesses who testify thousands of times. It'd be weird if one of those forecasts didn't come true once in a while.
Yes, and that probability is very low. Approximately 1% based on actuarial data.
> ..and of course, people have said this about whistleblowers and witnesses who testify thousands of times.
Because it did indeed happen many times. Hence why things like the witness protection program have been set up.
This is an extremely important point, looking at most causes of death, they are things like Heart Disease, Alzheimer, Chancers, diabetes. Nobody would be accusing Boeing if that was the case. Comparing this to general chance of death will lead to vast overestimate.
You have to compare to causes of death that are sudden, where the person was healthy enough to testify in court just a few weeks ago.
And again, this is all with the context of another suspicious death - gunshot wound to the head. Again, suspicious because foul play is plausible, not because there are no other reasonable explanations.
If someone died of something for which there was no reasonable explanation besides foul play, such as radiation poisoning, that would be referred to as evidence.
Yeah, out of a population of 32, it's unlikely to happen. It seems likely that this number is grossly underrepresenting the size of the population. Maybe whistleblowers are being targeted, maybe there are a lot more than 32, maybe both of those are true, but it seems unlikely that both of them are false.
That statement is not even limited to whistleblowers.
If you restrict the population to known Boeing whistleblowers whose first name starts with J, the odds get even longer.
Suicide is the 7th leading cause of death for men 55-62. It's considerably more common than murder.
Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
Barnett hadn't worked for Boeing since 2017, and was being deposed as part of his appeal of his original whistleblower complaint. It makes no sense to think that someone trying to silence him would wait until 7 years and one Netflix documentary have transpired.
and one died after ventilation?
A: As many as it takes for god to interfere.
i.e. You are just staying wilfully ignorant
Here is a recent case from Britain, there was evidence and the government covered it up. It took almost 50 years for us to learn the truth.
You're trying to defend a conspiracy theory by saying that waiting for even a shred of actual evidence is willfully ignorant? Really? And your point of comparison is a religious belief, something by definition not based on evidence? Wow.
Here is an illustration that demonstrates that the OP’s expectation is unrealistic and that nobody here actually thinks that way:
Dozens of Putin’s opponents died by falling out of a window, and no evidence of any kind was found that they were murdered. However, if I clam that Putin’s opponents were murdered, nobody calls it a conspiracy theory. Why?
Because a) we would not be told if there was physical evidence b) dozens of specific people dying suspiciously is statistically impossible, that is evidence in its own right.
So either the OP thinks that Putin is innocent, in which case his opinion is questionable
Or his position is based on a-priory trust to an institution and not on evidence, in which case it is also questionable.
It is probably the second - some people trust Boeing and some people think, hey, they already killed several hundred passengers, civility and sanity can no longer be taken for granted.
But as improbably events happen more and more, a sane person must shift their position to account for this. Ignoring improbably events and demanding physical evidence as people die would be madness.
The problem with your speculation as it relates to Boeing is that you have extrapolated from “someone had someone killed once” to “everyone who dies was assassinated”. I don’t believe you are making such an assertion but you’re attacking the method of thinking that avoids it.
You need to leave some room for there to be other causes of death, even in cases that feel suspicious. If there are suspicious circumstances they should and will be investigated. But if nothing nefarious is found that’s not evidence of foul play.