Hacker News Reader

Comment by newZWhoDis | Hacker News Reader

Let’s talk about scale: Jones has to pay ~5x what Boeing did.

Boeing killed 346 people

https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-crashes-245a38...

Boeing killed people while making a not-good-enough design for a highly complex airplane system. And even though it killed 346 ppl, it continues to get millions people safely from point to point safely.

It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.

Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.

This is misrepresentation, they didn't just happen to make a mistake in a complex situation. The crime was to know about the mistake and still not fix it - on purpose. The crime was to know that they should be giving people training on this system for safety reasons but they didn't anyway. Afaik it is an additional misrepresentation that the same system is now continuing on to fly. It is not, they fixed it and patched it.

Some of the issues were reported and a decision maker thought "we can get by without this". Pretty much the same reason the Challenger exploded. With a large company, there's gonna be reports about all sorts of stuff all the time, and you have to sort through the noise. They failed to do that here.

But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?

Crashing airplanes is VERY predictably bad for the stock price.

>But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?

This is not taking into account how humans are. People raise their children really badly all the time even though they know what they are doing is bad but they just don't care in the moment. Who wants a bad child? But they still make all the mistakes and end up producing bad children. Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.

> Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.

That is not the basis for our system of law. Intention (mens rea) matters greatly. Hence anyone who understands law shouldn't be surprised at comparing outcomes between the boeing case and the jones case.

You can disagree with it, but you really shouldn't be surprised.

one is punished more harshly

There is lot of evidence that the faults in Boeing have been internally reported multiple times and neglected.

Who deserves stronger punishment: a man who makes an error while driving and kills a family by accident?

Or a man who deliberately runs a person down (but his target survived), and intends to continue doing so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com