This is good advice in general, it doesn't have to be criminal in nature. Anything you're ordered to do that you don't want to be blamed for later, get it in writing, have a paper trail.
Doesn't it work like this that if you do it, and you end up a thorn in someone's arse, and somehow the paper/digital trail you build doesn't disappear in time despite hints you receive, an unfortunate accident will happen to you?
The banking crisis, VW's diesel-gate, BP's florida oil spills, the list of corporate crimes (not accidents, not whoopsies, but deliberate law breaking) is lengthy. They get away with it. Every time. I don't expect anything different happening this time.
However many do break the law, should be facing consequences. Otherwise, from the point of view of the CEO the optimal number of laws to break is all of them.
Calhoun was CEO during the near-deadly current disaster, and was a chairman during the previous deadly ones. He's also on his way out, kept around to negotiate with the unions and catch all the negative PR that will come out of it, and not to give a bad start to the future CEO.
Both him and Muillenberg (previous CEO and career engineer before someone says "they just have to put engineers back in charge") need to spend a few years in prison for killing and nearly killing people. Hopefully this will provide the necessary boost to Boeing fixing their culture.
Yep, if a punishment can just get neatly tied up on a balance sheet, explained to shareholders, and dealt with like any old loan balance, is it really a punishment?
Dismantling government oversight of corporations is sadly the dream of some under the guise of "small government". I understand why the very wealthy and the corporations do it. I don't understand why average Joes cheer for it. Weak government oversight is going to make every aspect of your life worse. It's going to poison the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat. It's going to make cars less safe. It's going to make air travel less safe.
Fines are the cost of doing business. These companies won't change their ways until thee executives responsible end up going to prison (or worse [1]). We have the likes of the Sacklers who became billionaires killing millions. In a just word, every one of them would die penniless in a 6x8' cell.
The (political) decision to overturn Chevron last week is going to make all of this worse because the likes of Boeing is going to challenge the authority of the FAA, the FTC and the NTSB in court. It's going to find a friendly judge (likely in Texas, which is built for judge shopping) and argue those agencies don't have the authority to oversee them. Or just to temporarily stay or overrule any decision that goes against them.
> Weak government oversight is going to make every aspect of your life worse. It's going to poison the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat. It's going to make cars less safe. It's going to make air travel less safe.
There's another side to this coin though. The US already has a huge list of government regulations and people paid to do nothing but regulate industry. Those industries currently poisonthe air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Are we to assume that regulation would work if we only have more than today, or that regulation didn't work despite how much we've thrown into it already?
One approach is to further regulate industry. Another approach is to remove legal protections that prevent corporations and corporate leaders being held legally liable for what they do. And I don't mean liable for fines amounting to fractions of profit and no risk of bankruptcy. Companies should be allowed to fail if they cause damage at such a scale, and leader/employees shown to actively make those decisions should be personally liable.
The challenge with less regulation is really that it moves responsibility back to the consumer, and it sure seems like most people really don't want to take responsibility for many aspect of their daily lives. That sounds horribly cynical, I don't know a better way to phrase it but it is absolutely true. Our bent on blindly trusting those considered experts is a great example of it, as is our blind faith in all modern pharmaceuticals as an alternative to accepting that sometimes our health issues are linked to decisions we make and how we live our lives.
> The US already has a huge list of government regulations and people paid to do nothing but regulate industry. Those industries currently poisonthe air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Are we to assume that regulation would work if we only have more than today, or that regulation didn't work despite how much we've thrown into it already?
The argument is that those regulations result in those conditions being currently better than they would be without, and we can look at history to see that this is in fact the case.
Would you expect effective government regulation to be perfectly successful, otherwise it’s deemed useless and might as well be gotten rid of? Do we hold any other pursuit by humans to the same standard?
> Would you expect effective government regulation to be perfectly successful, otherwise it’s deemed useless and might as well be gotten rid of? Do we hold any other pursuit by humans to the same standard?
There's a huge gap between what we have today and perfect regulation. Would you consider what the US has today, with all the issues of regulatory capture and revolving doors, as close enough to perfect that its reasonable to impose the regulations on us and limit our freedoms along the way?
I'm not proposing the anarchist, wild west pipe dream. I'm simply saying that we shouldn't so easily assume that our regulations that are questionably successful today would be better if only we doubled down on them. We can go the route of more regulation, moving responsibility off of industry and onto the government, or we can go the opposite and remove regulations while also removing liability protections. Allow companies to feel the pain of bad decisions and allow customers to make informed decisions rather than asking people to blindly trust experts that say something is safe enough, good enough for the environment, etc.
What the US has today is inarguably better than what we had before regulation. That is worth retaining and reinforcing, and it makes no sense to undo the regulation and go back to what was verifiably worse.
This debate doesn't have to happen in the realm of hypothesis and ideology, it’s all in the historical record, simply look at the abuses of industry during the 19th and 20th century before the institution of various forms of regulation of those industries.
Pure Food and Drug Act, preventing countless deaths from adulterated products.
Clean Air Act, from 1970 led to a 78% drop in air pollutants to date. Think LA 1970s vs now. Think Beijing vs NYC or any major American or European metropolitan/industrial center.
The Clean Water Act meant we stopped having Ohio's rivers catch fire. Lead paint regulations reduced the percentage of young children with elevated blood lead levels from 88% in the 1970s to 0.5% in 2016.
Look right now around the world at the behavior of companies operating in parts of the developing world where there is a dramatically reduced or nonexistent regulatory standard in terms of things like labor law, environmental protection, and consumer safety.
Corporations would love if the only recourse was lawsuits that they could spend literal decades repeatedly appealing in court, allowing them to reap massive profits in the short term while delaying any concrete penalties, if any, into the indefinite future, and frequently having those final penalties, again if any, represent a small fraction of their profits from the behaviors in question.
"Let companies murder people, poison people, abuse people, and irreversibly devastate the world, then let people try to sue them after the fact" is such a transparently terrible strategy for organizing a society.
We've already run this experiment of regulation vs no regulation countless times over two centuries. The default state of the world is one without regulation, and that's what we had at the dawn of industrialization and that's what still we have now in many parts of the developing world.
The horrors that constantly and predictably result are the entire reason for the emergence of regulation to protect people from the inevitable tendency of industries to produce negative externalities.
> Corporations would love if the only recourse was lawsuits that they could spend literal decades repeatedly appealing in court, allowing them to reap massive profits in the short term while delaying any concrete penalties, if any, into the indefinite future, and frequently having those final penalties, again if any, represent a small fraction of their profits from the behaviors in question.
This is also what we have today though. Companies get away with terrible actions until the public and eventually politicians catch on and have to act. Said action is often extremely slow and a slap on the wrist compared to the profits gained and damages caused by the companies.
How is DuPont still around after knowingly poisoning groundwater in parts of the eastern US? Regulators looked the other way, or were completely oblivious.
How is Fair Life still producing milk? Regulators clearly have seen the same reporting the public has, they either just don't care or are okay with the animal abuse as long as we get pasturized milk.
The list of companies getting away with egregious actions while supposedly under strict regulations is endless.
We can't say what a deregulated market would look like today, so much has changed since we started aggressively regulating industry. We also can't say, though, that what we have today clearly works better than the alternative with so many examples of what companies still get away with despite all of our regulatory agencies and their budgets.
> I don't understand why average Joes cheer for it. Weak government oversight is going to make every aspect of your life worse.
This is demonstrability false. Where I live I'm not allowed to do any work on my house as homeowners are not allowed to get permit. I have been in construction before and have the background and experience to do a lot of work correct, but I'm not a licensed contractor and don't qualify to become one and so I cannot do any of my own work. This regulation harms me - there are a number of projects I want to do that I cannot afford to pay someone else to do and so my house isn't as nice as I want it to be.
And you seriously think that allowing anyone to do unregulated construction, electrical or plumbing work is going to improve your life?
Even if we hyperfocus on the narrow self-interest of you being able to do your own work (which is questionable), you realize you go into other people's homes right? Your friends and family live in those homes? You go into those homes. Just how many houses burning down from shoddy electrical work is too an acceptable cost?
Just how much lead leeching into your water is an acceptable tradeoff? What about the power grid being down for days? Or unmaintained power lines starting wildfires? Or the car you drive being a death trap? Or pesticides in your food?
> Just how much lead leeching into your water is an acceptable tradeoff?
Chicago is the worse here because the plumbers union wanted to remain in control and so mandated lead long after everyone else was greatly reducing it.
Having been in the construction industry I can tell you from experience that they are no better than anyone else at doing their job safely or right. Some are good, some are corrupt - just like every other industry.
At that point, nonacquiescence is the only remedy, for the FAA to simply ignore the ruling. The executive branch also has more guns than the judicial branch. I would love to think that anyone in any position of regulatory power involving public safety with any shred of sanity would simply ignore the recent ruling, continue business as usual, and have the backing by the sheer monopoly on the legitimate use of force that the executive branch always had since the civil war (where nonacquiescence was invoked, because what was SCOTUS going to do about it? Lincoln had many more guns), but everything I just said implies some really... uncertain times ahead.
I think it was the ballot box, the jury box, and then the ammo box? Not that I think something is going to give violently per se or I mean to scaremonger, but it's hard to feel confident about the country's future in my lifetime with everything that's unfolded so far.
If you're wondering why you're both getting downvoted, please think about what you've added to the discussion with these unsubstantial comments. It's happened to me and I learned from it. The discussions on HN are good because people put efforts into their comments and refrain from making them when they have nothing of interest to add to the discussion.
He said that regularly his superiors would come to him and tell him that some part X didn't need a maintenance now.
He would then ask them to put their initials on the maintenance sheet. Suddenly maintenance was required!
If you work for Boeing or other criminal syndication, you need to have a paper/digital trail. Otherwise you'll be the one under the bus.
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