And there are a lot of them to charge. Start with the last two CEOs, add in the CEOs/COOs for Boeing Commercial aircraft, the test pilots, the program director(s) for the 737 Max, the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy, and then move all the way down to the Spirit and Boeing employees cutting deadly corners on the production line.
Yes, this might be driven from a punishment thought of justice but it is important that there is an educational correction in the business to no longer calculate human life in terms of money which one may balance against.
"Just following orders" is not a valid excuse. Your manager being a piece of shit forcing you to skip on safety does not invalidate your guilt in skipping on safety.
A whole team circumventing the official process and forgetting to put back bolts they took out isn't something that can be brushed aside as "they were just pressured by management". They made a very serious mistake and all of them deserve at least a suspended sentence for it - it literally could have killed 100+ people.
A whole team of engineers designing a critical system that can crash a plane with optional redundant inputs on inputs that are known to get blocked/fail are irresponsible.
* An "everyone was doing it, and everyone knew" layer of junior employees aged 20 or so.
* An obfuscation layer, comprised of several levels of middle manager who regularly shift roles, companies and countries.
* An "I had no idea this was going on, and would have stopped it if I'd known" layer. This is the CEO and suchlike.
If the criminal behaviour comes to light, the top-layer employees pretend not to have known about it; the bottom-layer employees say (accurately) that everyone was doing it and they thought it was normal; and the middle layers split themselves between the two, relying on forgotten e-mails, miscommunications, and placing the blame on people who aren't around any more.
If it was your job to tighten the bolts and you didn't, that's one easy slam dunk coming your way. And they're right.
Any engineer with AoA failure information (which I assume in Boeing is an easily obtainable information) should have designed/reviewed/approved MCAS in a different way.
See the VW emissions case.
Documents get names and signatures for a reason.
Hell, I'm not anywhere close to aviation, just have an interest in it, and even I know that AoA sensors are prone to failure (relatively, for an aeronautics component), can easily get blocked by external stuff, and multiple crashes and accidents have happened due to that. It's nothing short of criminal negligence to design a system using only one.
That's why aviation has very strict reporting and documentation requirements, everything should be traceable. Of course Boeing failed at that too, with them being unable to say e.g. who actually worked on the famous missing bolts. Send them all to prison for egregious negligence, and maybe the other workers will start refusing to do subpar and deadly work.
If the C-level knew, they were criminally culpable. If they didn't know, they were criminally negligent.
In that kind of situation, it absolutely is a management responsibility.
Test pilots have warned about this issue, we have emails proving it. Specific people have decided to release a dangerous plane, and those are people with decision making power higher up the food chain.
> the engineers who designed MCAS and didn't add in any redundancy,
There is, but it's optional :))))
Validate the tests while knowing that they shouldn't. It's literally their main job, to confirm that the plane handles as it should.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/explo...
When your literal job is to test critical safety features, yes, you can be blamed for failing at it. Especially when people died because you knowingly failed at your job.
What's next, not blaming architects for designing an unstable building that crashes down? Not blaming a chemical factory's security inspector for OKing dumping of toxic waste into a river?
From experience with government contracts, aircraft certifications, and listening to directors speak, they will tell people whatever needs to be said to get the airplane to pass a final check to get a certification.
One exchange I overheard with some details changed: >you will get a warning light here but this is the end of the fiscal and we need to ship airplanes. It will break on landing then take one week to get the replacement part and we have the maintenance contract anyways. By then we will do the work to fix the issue before anyone else actually flies this aircraft. You can retest it before final delivery and you will also get a bonus or we have more test pilots who hate being drone pilots.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22727244/boeing-737-max-...
“Do better” with no extra object specified means the implied subject should improve with respect to itself. Grammar only requires an extra subject in instances such as “Do better than …”.
As a further example, someone talking to me might say “spend less time arguing with randoms on the Internet and performing other pointless pontification” and an listener/reader literate in the language being used would know not to need nor expect an extra subject to be specified.
You’re claiming that capitalism is “bad” because there’s a hypothetical you imagined where there could be better outcomes?
Everything is “bad” by that standard.
Eg, “Airplanes are bad because they don’t operate based on anti-gravity warp drives! If airplanes want to shake that reputation, they need to do better!”
…do you have any reason to believe better outcomes are actually possible?
Can you show the court, on the dolly, where dspillett said it was absolutely bad?
IIRC the closest I came to that was suggesting it had a reputation for doing some bad things.
Saying something can improve is not the same as saying it is absolutely bad in all imaginable ways, unless you live in a fantasy world where there is no “meh” only perfection and anti-perfection.
> do you have any reason to believe better outcomes are actually possible?
Not much, beyond a small and rapidly diminishing supply of hope!
Capitalism is a birthday party and you're a present.
You'll notice that the capitalism detractors never advocate for greater capital management abilities. It is always to take away such ability so that they can feel less guilty about their choice in not wanting to manage capital. Can't really blame them. Managing capital truly does suck. But it is interesting nevertheless.
Capitalism allows private ownership of capital, just as (to introduce a comparison) you are allowed to have a birthday party, but you in no way have to participate. You can choose to forgo capital ownership entirely, you can hold public ownership with other people who wish to share in the ownership (e.g. co-ops), you can do just about anything you want. Even within the USA, you can find people doing all of those things.
What you probably cannot avoid is trade. I expect that this is what you really have in mind – it is oft confused with capitalism for some reason. Indeed, a human surviving in complete isolation from other humans without being able to share is an incredibly challenging feat, and, frankly, isn't realistic for anything more than a short period of time. Trade is not a feature of capitalism, though. Trade is something else, and is much more fundamental.
In reality, we all participate in capitalism. We all have to deal with this system, you can’t avoid it. It imposes its hierarchy on you from the day you are born, and getting out from under it is a lifelong endeavor. Nothing theoretical about the constant pressure coming from the top down. Maybe it’s not prescriptive of capitalism but you can’t deny it’s an emergent feature of the system, as if it’s an intended consequence. Cant really convince me at this point it’s not, sorry.
No I didn’t have trade in mind, listen to my words.
It is an emergent feature of trade. Realistically, there is always going to be someone who has something you want more than what they want from you, creating an imbalance. Trade and capitalism are not synonymous, though.
Consider the most primitive type of trade humans engage in: Sex. There is little question that the most sexually attractive "at the top" have way more power than those "at the bottom". People will fall over themselves for a chance to please the "hot girl" all while the "homely guy" doesn't even get the time of day. This is the same type of hierarchy that is featured in the larger discussion taking place here...
...Yet is not capitalism. If you do think that kind of sexual hierarchy is capitalism or a product of capitalism, you are not using a definition that aligns with any common usage. Sex appeal is not traditionally considered capital. Capitalism wasn't even invented when these human sexual dynamics came into existence.
> No I didn’t have trade in mind, listen to my words.
Your words are poorly chosen. I do my best to infer, but there is only so much to work with.
You could argue that the punishment is not harsh enough for deterrence, or not fast enough, but that's an issue with the government, not the market. Furthermore, the main reason why they are not more afraid of market repercussions is because they know the government needs them, they created a monopoly.
The system is mostly working as it should. The malicious players were found relatively quickly, through a mix of whistleblowing and the first relatively minor accidents getting a lot of attention (fourth estate and all).
Don't get me wrong, we need to keep making things better, there's so much work to do. But if the system were not working we would just have not heard about any of this and accidents would keep happening routinely while robber barons get filthy rich (literal violent monopolists, not plain billionaires), like 100 - 150 years ago.
>> Not really, it's just bad management
I believe the argument being made is that in "early-stage" capitalism a company could not afford that type of management, as it would immediately loose the market due to "true" competition and other "quality" options being available.
I think that the current version of capitalism is "working" (very relatively), exactly because there is substantial oversight from the government and the media, and there should be more.
An open and fair marketplace generally seems to be good at improving lives at scale. But I don't understand why so many people have this idea that it is a fundamental law of nature, that if you remove government intervention it will naturally become a more open and a more fair market.
An open and fair marketplace is quite artificial and needs so much enforcement to keep alive. Futhermore, even if it is good in general, there are a huge number of exceptional emergent behaviours that are bad and require intervention.
We clearly see from history that without oversight, the economy does not become an efficient market. It consolidates into rent-seeking monopolies, often defended and expanded by violence, controlled by an elite with a self-reinforcing long-lasting hold on power. In other words, different flavours of Feudalism, not always focused on land assets.
My point was generally that the system (and specifically the current flavour of capitalism) is not fundamentally broken, it has the right shape of components and they are working roughly how they are supposed to, to balance each other. If it was broken, things would be way worse, as we have seen throughout history. But there's so much to improve.
I guess I am looking at it from a too wide lens. Sure things are working much better than they used to a century ago, such disasters were largely accepted as a normal cost of being productive, there was no system to correct them. But that's no excuse, I do agree with you, this Boeing mess was not acceptable, the system needs to do better.
So while there is some competition, the airline industry is very much controlled and regulated by government.
And here in particular there was a lot of failures in particular with the FAA allowing Boeing to self-regulate (when has that ever worked?) and then the DOJ failing to prosecute after the two deadly crashes.
It really seems like a systematic problem, not an exception to an otherwise healthy situation. Time and time again we see a lack of consequences to corporate greed when those actions are literally killing people.
You're quite correct that things are not as bad as during the robber barons era, but that is a pretty low bar. We can do much better.
In my anecdotal experience, the EU social-democratic model seems to be the most competent one right now specifically for this problem: more of these should be state-owned. Don't get me wrong, this is a crappy solution too, you are making a lot of sacrifices for it, but generally, these state-owned corporations do seem to be better at delivering critical services, and often (unintuitively) more efficiently than private ones.
My point was that this is not necessarily about "late-stage capitalism" (as I understand it), this was not a case of the open market harming society. Because indeed Boeing is a state-supported monopoly and that's the root of the issue, at least in theory capitalism abhors monopolies.
This happened because Boeing has both the duty to make the most money possible, and is protected by the government because they offer a critical service. There is something fundamentally broken in this incentive model. Either let them play in the open market and encourage competition, or make it non-profit and serve the state directly. A mix of both is a recipe for disaster.