My first thought is "WTF!" But my second is this: every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually). With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.
Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.
I’m having a hard time seeing how pneumonia and stroke could be inflicted on a person as part of a cover up. Seems like this was just unfortunate illness.
Pneumonia is just a lung infection, so I imagine there's a number of ways you can make a person to unknowingly inhale something.
However, it looks way too complicated for a plot. There are many tried and proven methods of getting rid of people. Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works - we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done - shootings, stabbings, explosions, poisons, drownings, falling from heights, whatever - but I can't remember any case where a biological agent were used. And thinking about it - biological agents are hard to produce, hard to handle, unstable, unpredictable in use, can't be properly targeted, why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
So while it does look suspicious on its face, I'd have hard time believing it's an example of an assassination.
Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works
That's because it's the failures we learn about. Which could be 90% or 5% of "their works".
But never mind the spooks. We are also told "there's no perfect crime". Yet, less than half the murders get solved in the US, for example:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
Similar - the average IQ of prison inmates is lower than the general population. Which can be taken to imply that we only catch the dumb ones.
That only really holds if you assume criminal behavior is evenly distributed among the bell curve of IQ, which is is a fairly large assumption!
Not really. It depends more on how you interpret the phrase "the dumb ones." It's clear that if the IQ distribution of prisoners skews lower than the general population, then we only catch "the dumb ones" with respect to the general population. What isn't necessarily clear is that we only catch "the dumb ones" with respect to the IQ distribution of all criminals. (I don't think we even know or have any good way of determining what the IQ distribution of all criminals even is, do we?) It's just another instance where plain language can fail to be precise.
This is a good point. People here seem to be assuming that Boeing is competent at carrying out hits, which I highly doubt. We should consider whether they have actually tried it on a bunch of people.
The murders not being solved aren't "Perfect crimes". It's a matter of resources and timing.
99% of murder investigations mostly boil down to:
1. Literally witnessed by one or more people, possibly officers or on camera. 2. They brag about it. 3. A brief investigation of friends and family where it turns out so and so always hated them and happens to have a gun, and hey look at that the ballistics match.
There are a very small number of officers in comparison to the total population (as it should be), and the vast majority of them are not the kind being assigned to homicide.
Some major % of the "unsolved" murders in the US that mostly just get thrown on the pile because they find out 2 weeks later and either can't identify the victim, or can't find enough useful information to start investigating. Forensics is very useful, but hardly as portrayed in shows like CSI, and the simple realities of "well we didn't find much, found out weeks later, and it'll be weeks before we get any lab results back" often just mean there's 10 other "no shit" murders to deal with instead.
And this isn't even on the core topic here of "could this have been a hit by Boeing", which is just insanely unbelievable, ESPECIALLY given the method. People are off handledly mentioning things like Ricin or Polonoium attacks, but the important things about those is that they are INSANELY LETHAL and extremely easy to control.
"Lets infect him with pneumonia that turns into MRSA" has got to be one of the most risky, difficult, expensive, and unreliable methods of killing someone ever.
Hell if you want deniability there's probably at least 10 or so ways to easily cause a human to have a heart attack and look like they died of natural causes as compared to some magic MRSA gun.
The Russians want you to know they did it; just with plausible deniability.
They brought back the time-tested art of defenestration.
Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works
This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.
we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done
Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.
This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets.
Not a great example since we know for a fact that mass surveillance is happening. The U.S. Congress just voted to extend and expand it.
I believe that was indeed their point. People used to dismiss mass surveillance of the US on its people as a crackpot conspiracy theory, until the full extent of it was revealed by Snowden.
Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Just a handful though.
Snowden is a great example of how hard it is to keep things secret when they are real.
By "people" you mean "some people" and there are always some people. For as long as I've been alive the predominant public opinion has been that mass surveillance does take place. We've had evidence for that decades before Snowden got specific about the NSA's abilities.
Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.
But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveillance reasonably soon after it started. They aren't actually good at hiding. True, there was a period that somebody could say "we haven't learned about it yet so it probably doesn't exist" - which would be fallacious - but within a reasonable period of time, that option had disappeared.
Now, with assassinations, the biological weapons option has been existing for almost 100 years. If that were so common that even corporate machinators don't hesitate to use it to silence a witness of fairly low importance - we'd have heard at least a couple of cases, at least some rumors or defector reports. Just as we did with all other means of getting rid of witnesses. Since we didn't, I attribute very low probability to the possibility that this is how we learn about this being common.
You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.
Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. However, as I also mentioned, we have, over the years, pretty generous sample out of the mass of all assassinations. It would be rather weird if assassinations specifically using biological agents were somehow so special that while we have leaks about pretty much every other kind, we don't have any indications specifically about those. One could assume that is because this method is used only by the very best operatives going for very high-value target - but then we'd need to explain why suddenly Boeing corporates have access to it to deal with a pretty low-grade issue (and frankly I don't even see how it helps them by now - they are so deep in doo-doo anyway that one less witness is not going to save them). Such assumptions do not form a coherent picture if you look at the likelihood of the events involved.
why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
Like... head shot in an alley? suffocating them in their sleep? drowning them in a body of water?
I think you can probably answer your question yourself if you think about it
why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
So that you will think it is not suspicious
why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?
Ask Suge Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxPTtFv4AkM
You can assume criminals have gotten better at this type of thing since 1995
This sounds a bit like the toupee fallacy - you have never seen a good toupee, because the good ones you don't recognize as anything other than normal hair.
If you're a spook for an authoritarian government, it's probably better for your work to be somewhat visible to keep the serfs in line.
ricin was used BY the Soviet Union and Russia also used radioactive agents to kill someone not super long ago. And a nerve agent was used to kill someone close to Kim too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-na...
"Something?". Having them inhale oil or dirt will do it. Pneumonia is usually caused by a bacteria that's just everywhere (though usually on the skin), that's too simple. If it starts growing in your lungs, you can try antibiotics. If that doesn't work, well, nice knowing you.
We are surrounded by lethal bacteria. That humans survive depends on the immune system having a 100% success rate preventing bacteria from forming even a small colony in the lungs (and several other places, like the teeth, where infections can rapidly and surprisingly turn deadly)
This is why people cough so extremely hard when inhaling solid or liquid stuff in their windpipes.
Also this happens all the time. That someone dies from pneumonia is not uncommon (though for oil it's usually someone who manages to spray themselves with aerosolized oil at work). So even if an autopsy found a few specs of dirt in the lungs, and even if they actually trace that to be the cause, that's not extremely suspicious. (Plus why would they check? Obviously with a pneumonia patient you know the cause of death)
kind of the point though
Isn’t that kind of what they’d have developed COVID for?
Guy comes in with routine influenza, transfer him to emergency, pacify him and forcibly intubate him with MRSA infected tube. The rest happens as if by mistake.
So now Boeing and the hospital staff are in on the conspiracy. This place is turning into reddit.
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.
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!
It's quickly becoming worse than Reddit w/ regard to conspiracy nonsense that hits the first page within 5 minutes of being posted. Either HN loves conspiracy nonsense or it's being played by inauthentic actors.
What is so hard to believe about a weapons manufacturer killing someone?
My problem is that you're all implying an unprecedented criminal conspiracy and cover up with absolutely no evidence. My problem is mainly the no evidence part and that's not why I come here- I come here for evidence/fact-based discussion. Not conspiracy nonsense. With this amount of evidence we could claim anything and everything!
I don't think anybody's saying "This happened!" but are rather expressing a deep (and well-founded) distrust for the system in which whatever did actually happen occurred.
This is specifically against the guidelines:
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
He didn’t say that’s what happened, just someone did not understand how it could be done. The response suggested a possible way it could have been done. People are blackmailed and encouraged with carrots to do all kinds of extreme things. I know this for a fact.
I think people massively underestimate what a huge keystone Boeing is in the American empire. The top of the system has rapidly started getting extremely anxious about the stability of the whole system, especially as they are fomenting war with China and Russia and their plans not only becoming unstable, but actions they’ve taken revealing themselves as extreme risks in the light of stalled progression and unaccounted faults like what has been observed at Boeing the last years.
I personally see just the suspicion of what happened to these folks far more is a symptom of a failing system than is the failing system had neutralized them in hopes of snuffing out threats to keystone components if the empire. The people arts loosing confidence in the competence of the system, a far greater threat than even Boeing failing.
MRSA [1], though? He could have been inoculated with it.
MRSA is awful, difficult or impossible to clear, and can certainly be fatal.
This could be a very diabolical way to assassinate someone.
How would you be able to trace it? It could have been laced in his food or drink. Or simply transfered by touch (got on his hands, then wiped on his face or nose). Or aerosolized as he walked by.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...
There are 3 million Americans unknowingly walking around with MRSA in their nose right now, all around us. It is so common I'm not sure it would be a good assassination weapon even if you tried.
It matters where the infection takes hold. If it's in the respiratory system, that's a much different disease than surface legions and boils.
It's also trivially easy to culture MRSA. A lot of university micro-bio classes induce anti-biotic resistance in e-coli as an experiment for under graduates.
Can confirm. I did undergraduate bio and cultured lots of different bacteria species. I even used agrobacterium (which smell like feet) to clone genes into plants.
This is easily within the reach of DIY bio folks. You just need a freezer, bath, growth serum, and other easy inputs.
MRSA is fairly common especially in hospital settings. After all, you have a setting where people are coming in sick with a disease that is hard to kill and resistant to antibiotics.
Up to 30 of us carry staph variants in our noses.
I once worked with a researcher who was apparently the world's expert on giving mice strokes. Pneumonia seems more difficult.
certainly not out of reach for a determined and powerful adversary. infecting someone with a respiratory virus isn't exactly rocket science. just spraying a subperceptibly thin aerosol into someone's face should do it.
Or putting black mold in the air ducts in their home. Easy to pass off as just poor home maintenance.
You’re putting yourself at a massive risk though. This is an airborne bacteria, the “assassin” is probably going to get infected too.
What a business card
The US military used to have a stockpile of Q-fever bioweapons, that they claim to have destroyed. Q-fever can cause pneumonia.
A fucking cold can also cause pneumonia. There are thousands of things that cause pneumonia. WTF are you talking about.
He talks about a historical factoid. He also talks about something that can induce pneumonia that's deadly, not just waiting for some common cold to turn to pneumonia in an off chance. WTF about what he is talking about was difficult to parse?
Doubt Boeing or its spook going to use a bioweapon to off a whistleblower. Too complex, too many parties involved, too much of a trail, too high consequences if caught (i.e. terrorism), too high survival % vs. the panoply of less exotic options. It’s a Wile E. Coyote-level plot.
I have no idea but if many decades ago they revealed this [1], at this point it's safe to assume there are much better things.
[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...
Do you know what the toxin was?
Que the leaked pentagon briefing from … what was it, 12 years ago … about the use of “vaccines” to alter the brain chemistry of people with “extremist” views, so they too may benefit from approved values.
There's a long history of zany ideas being looked at. I'm not inclined to conclude it's technologically feasible just from that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb, for example.
In 2020 and 2021, there was endless online discussion of airborne pathogen distribution, measurement and defense.
Running someones immune system or poisoning them is a fantastic way to get plausible deniability. No smoking gun...
Plausible Deniability is when a person's involvement or culpability in an event might be denied, or at least mitigated, by creating a situation where they can claim ignorance or an inability to act.
I figure there's like a 99% chance it happened naturally, and a 1% chance it was the most brilliant assasination of all time specifically because any rational person would think it's unlikely to have been one.
Agreed. Being a whistleblower is probably very stressful.
There are a lot of easy ways to give someone pneumonia, like aspiration.
I'm not at all inclined to believe this is anything more than a co-incidence, but those things can definitely be induced in a way that's difficult to detect.
I don’t think too many spooks want to handle something as dangerous as MRSA. How do you even infect someone with that without infecting yourself in the process.
He had a sudden mysterious illness that caused him to have problems breathing. If this were a cover up, that illness would have been the cover up attempt, not the pneumonia. The breathing problems required the whistleblower to be intubated and he later developed pneumonia, and later still MRSA.
The pneumonia and MRSA were certainly just an unfortunate illness. The more conspiratorial can debate over if the original breathing difficulties that brought him into the hospital were the result of an assassination attempt or not. For all we know he just had Covid.
Not to say that I believe it happened, but there is a difference between actual cause of death and reported cause of death. As in, just because it was written down that pneumonia and stroke were involved doesn't necessarily make it true.
Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.
I think there were some heavy metal poisons (not Alice Cooper or Bret Michaels) that had symptoms of pneumonia, and the treatment for pneumonia fucked up the patient a bit.
both is very easy to achieve and also kind of medically obvious
If they were really killed because of their leaks, I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option. Do Boeing engineers work on stuff that secretive ? Are you given the nuclear codes on your first day ? I'm really curious
The effect on the value of the company and the strategic effect of letting Airbus (a European company) dominate aerospace manufacturing is a pretty big threat
well, whoever would make this type of "executive decision" should be prepared to go to jail for a really long time next to really violent bad people. Multinational execs did not show propensity for these types of decisions (the propensity at C-Suite is to pay a fine and move on....) So prior knowledge makes me think these are accidents.
It would be really good to get as much information about these deaths (and closure for the families)
PS. for arguments sake, if another Boeing whistleblower would get a sudden disease I would be more inclined to think that maybe there is some chemical/mechanical exposure in the Boeing / Spirit factories rather then some Michael Clayton-type action...
When is the last time someone from the C suite and had a good relationship to the government/defense sector went to big boy jail? I can’t think of an occasion, even though I can think of many deadly events where it’s very well arguable there should be criminal liability
Generally any white collar criminal does not need to go to "big boy jail," and I'm not sure why that needs to be a thing. Is this like joking about prison rape, where we just assume that the consequences of being incarcerated aren't enough, and we need "Bubba" to add a little "extra" because we're not as civilized as we believe we are?
Either way, rest assured that in the real world, a hypothetical executive who was convicted of ordering a hit would end up being treated the exact same way as a mafioso who did the same.
I see two different instinctual kneejerks here from HN. One, that this person's death must be a conspiracy, and two, that there is never accountability about any of these things. I understand why that is intuitive, but I think it betrays an understanding of the world that is closer to a movie-plot rather than reality(which is slow and boring and doesn't always result in satisfying "justice" delivered).
a hypothetical executive who was convicted of ordering a hit would end up being treated the exact same way
Sure, but the point is they'll never be convicted.
Generally any white collar criminal does not need to go to "big boy jail"
Why not? Are they special because they hurt people indirectly instead of directly?
a hypothetical executive who was convicted of ordering a hit
Well, there's the rub. They would have to be convicted. How often are executives held accountable for anything their company does?
You seem to be reading something into my wording there that I didn’t intend. I meant proper jail, not a fine, not a suspended sentence or one of the cushy prisons financial criminals tend to go to. I mean the same jail as a non-rich murderer, for example. No “ don’t drop the soap” tropes implied. Those piss me off too.
But yeah, white color crime that for example kills people (deadly pollution for example) should absolutely be treated like murder, or manslaughter at the very least. Why the hell not?
And the (hypothetical) effect on the value of a company in the (hypothetical) event they are proven to assassinate critics is . . . what exactly?
Are we talking about cases where someone at the company explicitly asked/ordered a kill, or including *wink* "handlings" of people? For example in 2012 the (EU) ECCHR said Nestle was responsible for the 2005 death of Luciano Romero in 2005. What about when in the case of the Banana Massacre you had Chiquita Banana making payments to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, who caused the deaths?
Looking at Nestle's historic stock performance I see no (significant) change around 2005 or 2012.
[0] - https://www.dw.com/en/nestle-under-fire-over-colombian-murde...
While obviously horrific, there's a large difference between paying a bunch of paramilitary members of a country where out and out murder by government is already an issue, and murdering citizens using arcane secretive methods such as suicide by hanging and magic mrsa infection.
If boeing is SO important to the government that justice doesn't matter, then it's probably a fuckload easier to bribe a judge or two and make sure the court cases never get anywhere than to orchestrate not one, but two, clandestine hits.
Further, why the fuck would you do the hits now? In both cases the information was brought out YEARS ago, and already in court. It hardly matters if they're alive or dead at this point.
I'm not suggesting Boeing was behind the deaths. I was replying to a comment that suggested that if a company took part in killing someone, it would hurt the stock/company significantly. I don't think that is true at all.
In the long term? Not much. Dow is Boeing's future.
I'm sorry, your tinfoil hat is slipping.
Boeing will never fail financially or fall out of use because of their importance for US geopolitical status. I don’t think the USA cares much about the issue except insofar as the USA wants Boeing to deliver reliable high quality products.
However, Boeing executives can (and should) get in to trouble. They probably care very much about what comes to light in court.
Boeing will never fail financially or fall out of use because of their importance for US geopolitical status
If the trial concludes with “Yes boing knew the planes were not safe but let people fly in them” it doesn’t matter how important it is to the US, no passenger will want to fly them.
1. Ivestigation/prosecution/Trial of which country? (people can be influenced)
2. As last resort: Us Gov can take over and actually reform Boeing (fixing public perception)
And there is whole continuum between 1 and 2.
(I really doubt that anything shady happened with this pneumonia; but IF something shady was done, US will make effort to preserve/save national aviation giant)
We already know that is the case and we continue to fly in them because we have no choice but to.
Also humans have startlingly short term memories.
People may not want to fly Boeing but they still want to fly.
Even if all US airlines wanted to switch, it would take Airbus a few decades to deliver replacements, by which time the issue will be forgotten (unless they keep crashing and falling apart midair).
US airlines will probably not be allowed use chineese planes as replacements.
I’m not trying to minimise Boeing’s responsibility, just saying that assuming the company starts to turn things around, nothing that comes out of the trial will affect the future of Boeing the company much, but it might well be catastrophic for the top brass.
By turning out bad product, Boeing has let Airbus dominate commercial aerospace manufacturing all on their own.
But why would any executive organize that and risk life in prison for their 0.3 percent ownership stake? They could just retire rich and leave the problems to the shareholders. Is there criminal liability that the executives may face that could form a motive?
I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option.
When Putin's regime punishes a critic or dissident, it is not done to stop this particular critic disclosing something sensitive. It is done as a warning to future critics. If you think this principle is never applied by western agencies, look at what happened to Julian Assange - after being prosecuted for 12 years the dude has lost it and Ecuador has kicked him out for smearing faeces on embassy walls.
Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
And they used to do it in the USA, in 1920's.
https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/88n97g/3-union-leaders-were-...
Yeah I have no doubt this serves as a message for future whistleblowers, but damn that is some level of prevention.
Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.
Unions are the kryptonite of capitalists and threaten their very existence, so it isn't that out of field; if we are to make the parallel, it means there is something in what they know that threatens the very existence of Boeing and I fail to imagine what
Yeah I have no doubt this serves as a message for future whistleblowers
I hope not because that’s exactly the risk in entertaining baseless conspiracy theories. If whistleblowers are disincentivized by conspiracy theories then why does Boeing need to go to the trouble of actually pulling off a conspiracy?
Any other industry I would have called bullshit, but defense companies are always a bit murky, with close links to intelligence services (who help in international negotiations and industrial spying) and current/former military. So lots of people who would know who to call to make things happen.
I have in mind for instance the Taiwan frigate scandal that has seen all sort of mysterious deaths, including Thiery Imbot (former DGSE, and son of former head of the DGSE), who died falling from a window in Paris. The official investigation blamed the wind which will make anyone who lived in Paris laugh.
So, I don't know, but not implausible.
Oh you're right, I completely forgot their involvement in defense projects. Maybe something involving the level at which Boeing along wiah the US gov spied on Airbus to win contracts as well.
I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option
It's a warning to future whistleblowers.
This is the commercial arm of Boeing, but not even that bit a spun off bit of Boeing that just builds airframes called Spirit.
Boeing does do highly classified things in other branches of the company that have nothing to do with any of this, even then nobody would be assassinated for the most egregious espionage outside of some absurd movie plot scenario. Spies go to prison if they’re not recruited for counterintelligence.
Influenza and MRSA would be very odd assassination tools.
I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I do like crime thrillers so I'll add that one potential reason could be that one or more people at the company are worried about prison time for something they did. That kind of thing could lead someone to make desperate moves, like assassinating a whistleblower. Hell, it doesn't even need to be someone high up on the ladder, it could be one of the factory workers that worked on a plane that went down, and is panicking because he got bad legal advice from ChatGPT!
... but I'm like 99.9998% confident this is actually just a series of non-malicious, tragic coincidences rather than a conspiracy.
The author, Dominic Gates, long time Boeing coverage reporter for Seattle Times and Pulitzer winner, has this to say:
I've had enough
Because I knew Josh, I had to report this - and the coincidence with Mitch, whom I also knew
But if you really believe Boeing has adopted Putin-style assassination, unfollow me and go away
If you're joking, it's not even slightly funny to joke about this death
https://twitter.com/dominicgates/status/1785812827581849988
FYI 11,000 people die of MRSA every year.
Actuarial table says death from all causes at 45 is ~0.4%. It's an unlikely death, paired with another unlikely death - the previous Boeing whistleblower.
I'm really confused by the reporter's attitude. It seems like the exact opposite attitude from what you'd want in a reporter. He seems to be dismissing the unusual coincidence based on... I guess nothing? Just "come on, you can't believe that - we aren't Russia."
How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? How many should we expect will die by chance this year? If another one dies is that the cutoff where it's reasonable to be suspicious?
I don't understand why I would extend any courtesy to Boeing. I was suspicious when the first whistleblower died. Why shouldn't I be? You may be a perfectly nice guy, but if the witnesses testifying against you start dying, I'm going to be suspicious. Why should I treat Boeing any differently?
Check your priors. What's your base rate likelihood for a person dying from:
* suicide (many documented cases)
* infectious diseases (ditto)
* corporate assassinations (zero cases in the US documented)
Everyone thinking Boeing is carrying out killings that have minimal potential upside and massive downside is succumbing to some cloak and dagger deus ex machina. After age 40 people die from all sorts of causes. This is not about "courtesy," but rational thinking that there would be almost no point in killing an employee when the company is already mired in bad news and that corporate assassinations just don't happen in the US.
corporate assassinations (zero cases in the US documented)
That's the whole point of corporate assassinations isn't it, get rid of people without raising suspicions.
But the chances of them being both a) widespread and b) perfectly gotten away with is pretty slim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal doesn't inspire confidence in big corporate cospiracies, heh.
Zero documented cases of corporate assasinations in the US?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...
Homicide is a top 10 leading cause of death for americans in their mid 40s.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions around the first death.
In a post-COVID world, a 45-year-old dying of a respiratory infection isn't at all surprising. I concur with the reporter's assessment that more evidence of foul play before open accusations is warranted in this second case.
Yes, it is surprising. As I mentioned, 0.4% chance of death for a 45 year old man from all causes. That's surprising. Unexplained rapid onset respiratory disease to MRSA to dead is also surprising.
More evidence is needed - that depends what you mean. Needed for what? Conviction? Arrest? Sure. Suspicion and investigation? No.
from all causes
Thing is... This isn't "all causes," nor is a 45-year-old aerospace employee a perfectly-spherical unit human. Adjust the Bayesian priors.
I've had relatives who worked in manufacturing. Note the past-tense. The things it can do to a person's respiration and cardiovascular system are... Not pretty. Especially if, say, they were working for a company with a history of dodgy behavior (because if they're putting product out to paying customers that sucks, are they really providing their front-line crew all the PPE that is required to keep them healthy?).
So a 45-year-old who put 20 years in at a place that, let's hypothesize, isn't controlling for silica dust the way OSHA demands, gets a flu during flu season, and down they go? Especially when we don't yet know what the long-term effects of exposure to COVID are (even with vaccination)?
Too many variables to be suspicious of direct malice. But, probably enough to warrant OSHA making a snap inspection of Spirit to count the respirators and check the filter expiration dates...
The reporter does not want his wife, children or other family members to commit suicide or fall ill and die.
Gates has been reporting news critical of Boeing for 20+ years. He is not a fanboy and never has been. They probably should have taken him out long ago.
One in four people being treated for MRSA are dead within a month.
"It was definitely a murder to create a chilling effect on whistleblowers" says a guy on the internet, pushing a narrative that if you whistleblow on Boeing you'll definitely be murdered.
What effect do you imagine that might have?
FYI 11,000 people die of MRSA every year.
In the US alone.
This was before use of the internet was widespread, but I knew a women who worked at a regional airport. She repeatedly reported safety violations to the (politically connected) operator of the airport, but was ignored. Eventually, she reported them to the FAA who launched an investigation.
- She started receiving threatening phone calls
- Pictures of her kids walking home from school showed up in her mailbox
- Her house was shot up in the middle of the night
- The family dog was killed, disassembled, and the parts were strung up in the house
The police wouldn't do anything and she eventually had to quit her job and move out of the county.
Do you have a source or reference for this? I'd be really surprised if some of your items (e.g. her house being shot up, her dog "disassembled") wouldn't result in some level of journalistic coverage.
My apologies, but my time on the Internet has definitely trained me to be skeptical of extreme reports that make me enraged, without additional evidence.
I suppose one would have to take OP's word. A 3 year old account doesn't seem to be the kind (hopefully) engaging in false rumors. And after all this I definitely wouldn't expect her to go forward lest her family gets harmed.
Sidenote, but coming from a country where it's "known" that speaking up against corruption can likely end up killing you, it's funny to see people being skeptical about it. It's maybe similar to racism/sexism - yes, don't believe anything without proof - but if someone claims it's happened and give details, it's certainly quite plausible.
People exaggerate or flat-out lie about these sort of things all the time if they feel victimized (rightfully or not). Threatening phone calls I can believe, but it gets more and more unbelievable the further down the list.
I make no judgements, but this is absolutely a "trust, but verify" type of situation IMHO.
The eBay stalking case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal) suggests this isn't as implausible as it sounds.
Frankly tame compared to the Wolf Tree case.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...
I’m not surprised to read this, as it only takes 1-2 people to do these sorts of things, and some people are capable of it. They may not be totally mentally stable, or they feel desperate, or confident they can get away with it, or all of the above.
American history is full of these sorts of incidents of harassment, violence, and sometimes even murder. The history of the labor movement or civil rights movement is sobering.
It doesn’t take a CEO making a call to some assassin on the corporate payroll. Usually the reality is far more banal: a supervisor or coworker or neighbor who just takes matters into their own hands.
To be clear, I’m NOT claiming that that is what happened to Josh Dean; I’m speaking generally about people getting harassed for trying to do what they think is the right thing.
Similar things happened to journalists and activist short sellers reporting on irregularities at Wirecard before it all blew up. (The German authorities reacted swiftly to the reports by... banning short sales of Wirecard shares and investigating the journalists for market manipulation.)
Occasionally, reality apparently is as crass as some classic corporate conspiracy thrillers suggest.
what county? sounds evil-crazy obviously
This sounds like a movie plot where the mafia has taken over a major corporation.
Just call Liam Neeson.
I know a lot more women who have had this kind of thing happen to them, and they didn't work in airlines. They were just women with stalkers.
The only thing more dangerous than flying on Boeing appears to be criticising them
The total number of deaths in all airplane crashes combined since 1970 is about as much as MRSA kills in 8 months of a typical year.
I'm not sure what you think this shows.
If we had an organization responsible and capable of preventing MRSA deaths, and was failing to do so, they'd be in prison at 8 million deaths.
The issue here isn't how many deaths, it's whether boeing has a duty and capability to prevent them; whether it has failed to do so; and whether this failure has caused a systematic problem with its recent planes that could lead to more deaths.
On all accounts it seems: yes, they've gutted product quality and it has lead to severe accidents.
I'm simply pointing out the relative frequency of these incidents, that's all.
If we had an organization responsible and capable of preventing MRSA deaths
MRSA is known for spreading in hospital settings. Hospitals are supposed to prevent this from happening, but it is hard.
Hospitals are supposed to prevent this from happening, but it is hard.
Physician here. Hospitals do work to prevent the spread, and it is hard—so much so that it's nearly inevitable. MRSA is a naturally occurring part of the respiratory tract and skin. How do you stop that? Also important to note that those who do acquire and die from MRSA infections tend to be relatively ill to begin with. Usually those patients are admitted to the hospital for some other serious issue and then develop a MRSA infection either from their own body or the hospital. While you can mitigate the latter, you can't do anything about the former.
relative frequency of these incidents
Is about the same as frequency with which Putin kills his political opponents. [1]. So either frequency is not a very good way of judging criminal culpability and morality, or Putin is a great guy.
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-critics-dead-full-list-navaln...
You don’t find it concerning and possibly suspicious that both whistleblowers have died? The first one said “if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide”. Now this…
The first one said “if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide”.
That's what one of his female friends claimed he said. You don't think it's more likely that a grown man of the boomer generation might not be up-front about his mental health to his female friends?
Meanwhile, others who were closer to him said he was having a tough time. And he was found in his own truck, shot with his own gun, with his hand on the trigger, and a note, across state lines from where he lived. And the responding investigators didn't report any signs of foul play.
It's certainly a possibly, but the evidence just doesn't add up that way. As humans, our brains are wired to fall for the narrative fallacy, even when it isn't a good explanation.
So you’re saying there’s a tremendous allowance to be made for quality to diminish further before you feel like it’s a real problem?
No, I'm saying that this MRSA infection was likely natural. About 3 million Americans are MRSA carriers.
This is just juxtaposition of two completely unrelated things. The only relationship they have is an endpoint of death.
What's the survival rate of Boeing whistleblowers compared to non-whistleblowers?
Right now it seems close to zero.
Isn't the survival rate of us all technically zero anyway?
Life is the only sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate.
Gospel
In the long term yes, but I'm here shitposting and the two other guys are dead, and it's only been 2 months.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
At least we know that the survival rates of Boeing whistle blowers and passengers are comparable.
They had the right to remain silent. /s
It appears that criticizing Boeing is even more dangerous than flying in one.
Could be there are just a lot of Boeing whistleblowers.
Yes, 2 out of how many? The denominator is important here.
And the denominator isn't just the number of Boeing whistleblowers but the number of similar cases where whistleblowers could have died and raised suspicions, but didn't. We can't just cherry pick the Boeing example after the fact.
Something something survivorship bias plane meme. But maybe that one's in poor taste under the circumstances.
Would punch too many holes in the argument :)
Either way, boeing looks kinda suspect here...
Small number of whistle-blowers: boeing looks pretty suspect, because why do they keep dying?
Large number of whistle-blowers: boeing looks pretty suspect, because why so many?
I believe there were 7
Edit0: Nope - 32 whistleblower complaints in the last three years, but I imagine some of those could be from the same person - so up to 32. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
Yeah, so perhaps there's no conspiracy of assassination. But if you're so shady that SO many people have come forward to blow the whistle that MULTIPLE are likely to die purely by chance in the course of investigation - you probably deserve whatever suspicion you're getting by that point.
""He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.""
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...
From Healthy to Dead in 2 weeks is still pretty extreme. It isn't like pneumonia and MRSA aren't known factors.
Perhaps a 'weaponized' MRSA?
Antibiotic resistant MRSA kills thousands of people a year in the US. The idea that he went to the hospital with pneumonia and then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.
Pretty sure the cause of death "seeming very plausible" is highly valued.
Indeed. That doesn't make it less plausible.
then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.
Wouldn't other people in the hospital contract it as well?
MRSA is already a weaponized MRSA.
I don't think people who don't spend a lot of time in hospitals have any idea how quickly a person's fortune can change. They're still the best place to care for the sick, but they're also hotbeds of disease because, hey, we keep all the sick people there.
One overlooked sanitization, one visit from a relative who touched the wrong thing on the way to your room, one spot of genetic bad luck that makes you particularly susceptible to infections you'd be likeliest to encounter in a hospital, one never-diagnosed allergic response... That's all she wrote. Doesn't matter over-much how healthy you were before because "on your back struggling to breathe for days on end in a strange environment" is a wildly different environment to "enjoying the fresh mountain air close to home."
Boeing and Conspiracies aside, this is the scary thing.
Discussing 'conspiracies' is actually an entertainment so we don't have to think about the reality like anti-biotic resistant diseases that could cause another pandemic.
Easier to contemplate secret assassin organizations, hired by big Corps. Or a Boeing, Military Industrial complex, CIA connected death squad.
Stress kills and he was under a lot of stress but I’m not sure how anyone would be able to produce enough evidence to be certain.
The first Boeing whistleblower to “off himself” allegedly told his family shortly before he died that if anything happened to him, “it’s not suicide.”
https://www.newsweek.com/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblower-p...
From what I've seen that's kind of overselling it, his own family hasn't claimed that he said that, an anonymous person who claimed to be a friend of his did.
But I may have missed any further developments to actually verify that his family had been told something similar.
Yeah, his family said "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing which we believe led to his death". As much as a conspiracy for fear of being next could come into it I'd have to believe it'd be more than a lone and anonymous friend of the family that would speak out if confided with this info.
Between that and the 30 some whistleblowers in the last 5 years that two died close to one another isn't all that damning.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...
And in Barnett's case, he'd been talking since 2019. Even if one thinks Boeing would be willing to have people murdered, the time to do so would be before they became public whistleblowers, not a half-decade later.
Maybe they were hoping he will give up himself due to bureaucracy.
But I may have missed any further developments to actually verify that his family had been told something similar.
You have not, his family thinks he killed himself, but blames Boeing for making his life awful for several years.
An unarmed “family friend” who hadn’t spoken to him in over a decade. Total hearsay at best.
Apropos of the context of this situation...
As a paramedic, I'd take this with a grain of salt: I have been on calls for a non-trivial number of patients who've sworn black and blue that they're "no longer suicidal", "no longer a threat", "if anything happens to me, it wasn't suicide" who, you guessed it, went on to attempt or commit suicide in very short order.
Could the explanation be that being a whistleblower is really stressful and hard on your health?
Sure, but I'm not sure why we have to invent excuses for companies. They create them themselves just fine.
I wouldn't say "expecting horses and not zebra" is "creating excuses."
You can refrain from giving Boeing the benefit of the doubt here and still come to the conclusion "It's not weird that someone didn't recover from a respiratory infection during flu season."
I wonder how many whistleblowers (raw number or percentage) dying would cross the threshold where we don't give Boeing the benefit of doubt or explain it as a coincidence. Seems the answer so far on HN is "unknown but at least greater than two."
Me personally: I find the first death extremely suspicious and someone with MRSA dying in a hospital not very suspicious.
Given that he died of MRSA in a hospital two weeks after falling ill, yes.
That's how the thread dismissed the last one.
Once is by chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.
No conspiracies are true, i know that from my time in the business world, even in small companies i've never actually seen anyone conspire, create hidden alliances og plot something so surely in larger companies it's even less likely to happen. /s
“Trust no one! The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them! ” ― Col. Hunter Gathers, OSI
This might be my favorite quote I've ever heard. Thanks!
Look at the size of pool of whistleblowers and associated people that bad actors would want to harm, their demographic and what that demographic's mortality rate is like. Two deaths in a year is borderline acceptable, three would be extremely unlikely.
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." - Ian Fleming
Four times is God having a vendetta against you. Five times is quantum physics wants you dead. Six...
All in on Boeing.
Any company willing to murder two people to maintain the share price is an excellent investment in my books.
You should re-think that. First, it's immoral. Second, it's highly unwise.
If the whistleblowers are right, then planes are going to keep breaking. If planes keep breaking, the share price is going to collapse.
It sounded like sarcasm, to be honest.
A defense contract will suddenly materialize
I don't know. Ford Motor Company and General Motors still exist after their inventive ways to circumvent repairs that could have saved lives. Yes, i know they are very sorry.
Companies don't murder people. People murder people.
I looked [1] at all the prominent whistleblowers in the last ~50 years, and while some people have been seriously harassed and felt their lives were in danger, there's only a single case where someone was plausibly murdered by a private company. (Governments murder whistleblowers all the time.)
Interestingly, it was in the 1970's and the woman blew the whistle for safety practices around the handling of plutonium!
[1] https://twitter.com/dschwarz26/status/1786133630474977785
Don't misrepresent this - you used your own AI-powered product to do "research"
So across the ~50 or so prominent whistleblower cases against big co's that I researched with futuresearch.ai, retaliation is common, harassment is rare but does happen, but murder is not. And given the details of Joshua Dean and John Barnett's death, it's simply much too plausible that this is a fluke of timing.
There's a really good movie about it too.
Thanks for taking the time to tackle this research.
I think you should mention that „I looked” was done with help of your AI project. That does not spark much confidence given current state of LLMs and their „research”.
From your twitter article:
So across the ~50 or so prominent whistleblower cases against big co's that I researched with futuresearch.ai, retaliation is common, harassment is rare but does happen, but murder is not.
I looked [1]...
Your AI looked at it, you didn't. I also have the hunch that your research was limited to US whistleblowers only, can you confirm?
Do you mean that you did the research, or your AI product did the research? How are you assessing whether a death was plausibly murder? So strange that the one example you find is of a car crash (one of the most common ways people die!) and no citation that it was found to be murder.
At some point, another one apparently found two missing lug nuts on a wheel of his car, and texted his lawyer "if I die I am not suicidal".
Got a source for that?
No reason to downvote someone for asking for a source (before one was given).
A source is helpful context for claims like this, and the person that responded with one may not otherwise have had it not been questioned.
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-3...
Inside the whistleblower’s text was a photo of a wheel missing two lug nuts.... “If anything happens,” they told me, not for the first time, “I’m not suicidal.”
I don't know why you're being downvoted and questioned. This was widely reported last month when John Barnett was found dead from a gunshot wound in the head. AFAIK, (and don't quote me on this), only one source had said this.
I don't think it's wildly conspiratorial to discuss this, even if the implication is "this might be a pattern of foul play".
Even if both of these deaths are coincidences and within statistical reason, I imagine the perceived pattern must have a chilling effect on other would-be whistleblowers.
I doubt that happened.
Boeing is currently 2-0 with whistleblowers.
I wonder if you could give someone MRSA intentionally. Is that even possible?
2-0 with whistleblowers
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
How many are left, anyhow?
30 to go it seems https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
MRSA (staph) can be transmitted by wiping a used bandage on someone.
You could even mail it to somebody and when they open the mail, BAM. Or it could be included in the glue of business reply mail. Or wiped on your doorknob.
Not in the Aljazeera reporting, but Seattle Times says he initially was hospitalized for "trouble breathing": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...
And "trouble breathing" could mean any of a whole bunch of things, a few of which you probably can give someone intentionally…
There should be a huge investigation, but since the last death was self-inflicted, and this one was due to some mysterious illness, I’m not holding my breath. I wonder if the bank accounts of coroners ever get audited.
What's "mysterious" about the flu and MRSA?
It’s mysterious for healthy people to suddenly die from flu in their mid 40s, yes.
Healthy people don't have bacterial co-infections, so no.
Influenza B is mysterious?
There's a whole mythology about John Barnett, the previous Boeing whistleblower who died. But Barnett's whistleblower case against Boeing had been wrapped up years prior, and his outstanding litigation, over defamation, was insignificant to Boeing's bottom line. Boeing simply didn't have a reasonable motive to be involved in his death; to argue that Boeing had a hand in it, you need to be arguing that Boeing is something more than ruthless.
Barnett's case sparked a lot of interest because it was a suicide. Here, Dean died of an illness, so to pursue a conspiracy-theoretic angle to this story, you again need to suggest that Boeing is more than ruthless (for Barnett, that "more" is "irrational"; for Dean, it's "Bond-villain theatrical").
If I were considering blowing the whistle on some behavior at Boeing I'd sure think twice now that two people have died. It may be that their testimony was complete but there's still a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.
By that logic every large corporation in the world should be randomly killing people to deter prospective whistleblowers.
Nah, don't need to kill them, just have your PR team make sure that every death that does happen is headline news.
Qatari propaganda outlet Aljazeera on the frontpage. Perhaps it could be a replaced by a more credible one?
I think that you are missing how credibility and propaganda intertwine. The BBC gives you accurate reports on Indonesia and Chile to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Britain. Aljazeera give accurate reports on Boeing and Airbus to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Qatar. NPR give accurate reports on Angola and Bangladesh to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of the USA.
One navigates an adversarial information environment by harvesting the free truth provided by those seeking to build credibility. Then one tries to avoid the flames when the same organisations burn their credibility to boost their funders and owners.
Encouraging conspiracy theories against one of the largest components of the US military industrial complex is precisely something Al Jazeera would be willing to risk losing credibility over. Not that they actually would, because there could never be sufficient evidence to disprove such a conspiracy.
I reckon the vast majority of planet Earth would take Al Jazeera's word over the BBC, CNN, etc, most days of the week.
And twice on Sundays.
While the first death opened up many questions for me, this death was the result of a MRSA infection, stroke, and pneumonia.
This headline feels like it's trying to play on the conspiracy theorists among us, with the important bit way down in the article. Well, they got my view.
As though MRSA isn't a great thing to inject into an enemy...
2% of people are carrying it around; it's a pretty common hospital complication.
It's also possible that there were multiple, uncoordinated acts of malice and thus not a conspiracy. There are many parties that would like this to go away, from investors to unions to airlines.
What happened to the other thread about this news item?
Freak milk frother accident.
What does that mean in normal english? I'm not a native speaker, and my question about the other thread was genuine.
You can find the various posts with the search thing. A bunch of them got merged which is what usually happens with a pile of dupes
His mother wrote on Facebook that he had contracted pneumonia in April and suffered a stroke following an MSRA infection.
So which one is it? Suddenly or not?
I mean, all death is sudden when you think about it.
(I say this with all of the seriousness of a 1980s British comedian who probably thought it before I did)
It's like the Hemingway quote:
"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."
I've learned recently that sometimes dying is just getting sick, and failing to get better.
EDIT 3: God damn it - forget it. The rate is per 100,000 - the site I got it from was terrible [1].
So the numbers don't work at all - the death rate should be about ~0.8% in any given year for the full population going by [2] (798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022).
Just to elaborate: my thesis before I edited this post was that if you have a large number of whistleblowers, the chance of someone in the population dying of normal causes over a given time frame might become quite large.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.AMRT.MA
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm
I agree that it doesn't make much sense to kill someone after they've testified, but that 1.6% figure (I think you inadvertently omitted a decimal point) doesn't account for age. Joshua Dean was 45 (0.4% chance of a 45 year old male dying in a given year). John Barnett was 62 (1.5% chance).
Yeah I was way off on the death figure, but the point is relevant: the risk of a large population and a low probability event is that the low probability event can become a near certainty due to normal causes.
~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)
My point was meant to be that saying "there's a chilling effect" is also creating the chilling effect by implying it's there, when in reality it can just be something more akin to the Birthday Paradox.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...
"That is, in any given recent year, if you take a sample of 1000 random males, within a year, almost 16% of them will have died."
Surely this can't be true.
People need to put down the spy thriller books.
Dude was sick. Really sick. Had been for awhile. Nothing nefarious here, just a shitty clickbait title to get people riled up as usual.
""He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.""
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...
He had pneumonia and MRSA. As we just saw with covid, respiratory issues can be a death sentence easily.
Sure. But from Healthy to Dead in 2 weeks is still pretty extreme. It isn't like pneumonia and MRSA aren't known factors.
Perhaps a 'weaponized' MRSA?
that's crazy. that's the second one... how can the authorities ignore the "coincidence"?
government is really weak with the strong and strong with the weak.
Do you have any proof it's not actually a coincidence? There were 30 whistleblowers, and it's over 3 years.
i hope they won't be stupid enough to kill a third one
How many people would, if they suddenly died, be reported as a "Boeing whistleblower"? The lower this number is, the more surprising the death.
What if it's a giant company with a lot of problems? Couldn't there be a ton of whistleblowers? It's easy to suspect foul play, but I don't know how pneumonia subsequent to MRSA infection could be deployed as a weapon of assassination. And I'd imagine that every part of being a whistleblower is depressing; you are inevitably alienated from one of your main social groups when you do so.
It also ought to be pretty shocking, if things are so bad at Boeing that multiple whistleblowers dying is just an expected thing as a result of statistics.
I mean that’s probably the more likely story than MRSA corporate assassins. But it is still pretty nuts, right?
Boeing has some competent people, apparently. Sad and aggravating that it's this particular department.
Probably the chief of "special operations" dept. could take over the QA dept.
C'mon man, haven't you seen Michael Clayton? They're independent contractors.
Bad luck, most likely.
Sounds like a first got flu, which then progressed into pneumonia. This is normal.
Then he was admitted to the hospital, and probably contracted MRSA - which is not unusual either. Or did he get it prior to that? Either way, it happens.
And from there it progressed into sepsis, which he might have been fighting for some time? Anyway, heart attacks, strokes, etc. can happen when you get sepsis. Sepsis can come out of nowhere.
Doesn't really sound suspicious or sudden.
Having a chain of individually likely events still has low total probability i.e. (80%)^8 = 17% chance
The probability of these exact events occurring is not the relevant question though
Are there other whistleblowers?
If there are, I can't imagine how they feel.
According to this article there are 30[1]. Another whistleblower allegedly committed suicide two months ago [2].
[1] "Aside from Mr Barnett and Mr Dean, there are some 30 Boeing whistleblowers, including Mr Salehpour." https://theloadstar.com/im-scared-says-boeing-whistleblower-....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(whistleblower)
I thought this only happened in second and third world countries.
Isn’t that viewpoint just the result of nationalist propaganda in education/media in the US?
The US is infamous for extra judicial killings, both domestically and internationally.
... he had contracted pneumonia in April and suffered a stroke following an MSRA infection.
That should be "MRSA", for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Terrible fact checking.
(But they did helpfully provide a hyperlink to Facebook-related stories.)
Bacterial infection, grammatical inflection, both natural causes of death [According to uncyclopedia Wiki probably? Don't ask me, I am not germ-anist here in germ-any]
Clever idea, to infect someone with a nasty yet natural virus/bacteria. Still, if it doesn't work and unlucky things keep happening then authorities may start looking more closely.
Nit: MRSA is a bacterium, not a virus.
The thing about being suspected of one murder is that you tend to get blamed for other deaths.
You’ll never make a good Dread Pirate Robert’s with that attitude.
Considering the sensitivity of their profiles, is there going to be at least a cursory investigation?
It would seem to be pretty rare for this to occur for a man his age. Intubation is pretty serious, was that the cause of the MRSA?
Let me guess, we're chalking this one up to coincidence too, are we?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but were I an assassin I'd probably want something a little more guaranteed than inducing pneumonia.
I've seen some speculation [https://zeroes.ca/@maggiejk/112369197303623748] that this looks a whole bunch like COVID, and that sounds vaguely on point. Then again we're all armchair doctors now…
[Ed.] also note that https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea... says the initial hospitalization was for "trouble breathing"; this doesn't seem to be in the Aljazeera reporting.
then again this is why i would kill someone in a way that looks like covid if i would be such inclined. also i don't know anybody who ever died of covid, not even indirectly. so, yeah ...
Good that they have mentioned the actual illness, or people would assume it was acute lead poisoning.
"Sudden illness"
Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA.
Am I the only one who knows a half dozen people who have gone into hospitals for a sprained ankle and died of an infection?
Easy to get infected when you’re dying of radiation poisoning and have no immune system.
Are whistleblowers considered legal witnesses who qualify for protection programs? A Streisand-effect website could aggregate the claims of all dead whistleblowers, regardless of cause of death. This could increase incentives for protecting whistleblowers until their legal cases have been resolved.
Hmm. another Boeing-related whistleblower expired
Just yesterday here were a bunch of comments and jokes about how it would look like if this guy dies too. And here we go … fast spreading infection in a 45 years old guy.
Is there a must have course on executive voodoo and "dark rhetoric" for execs of large dysfunctional companies? Which MBA teaches sociopathic courses like these? I only know about one such college in Paris...
There is someone who has a interest not in losing money when one.. for sure! Some stock holders with access to Bakteria. It's easy and effective. Without suspects. Hmmm.. I see what you did last summer next year then...
/Irony
According to cdc.gov, the MRSA bacteria which killed him can spread by simple contact with infected people or objects. I can't but recall the anthrax attacks happened shortly after 9/11. It's completely unrelated and 100% speculation, but an infection caught by something received by a intercepted and compromised package couldn't be completely ruled out.
Suspicious deaths of whistleblowers is terrible PR for Boeing. Seems unlikely anything nefarious would be going on as it only invites additional scrutiny. Unless maybe we buy into the conspiracy that Boeing needed to send a message to future whistleblowers.
The airline manufacturing industry has few employers. The threat of being blackballed for future employment is much more of an incentive to keep quite IMO. But maybe I'm being naive?
Or maybe there's some backhanded government connection that someone outside of Boeing wants to keep quite.
If Boeing would only manufacture airplanes they would struggle from these recent developments.
Blacklist is real !!
Perhaps the whistle itself is contaminated.
What, again? Pure coincidence.
Spirit Aerosystems: the part Boeing spun off because even it did its own thing. Without the public profile of Boeing, it must have been an even more hostile place to be.
His mother wrote on Facebook that he had contracted pneumonia in April and suffered a stroke following an MSRA infection.
I love a good conspiracy theory but this sounds pretty far fetched, how do you cause someone to contract pneumonia?
At this point Boeing should hire bodyguards and top-of-the-line doctors for all their past whistleblowers to make a big show of doing everything in their power to keep them alive.
The reputation problems of killing whistleblowers are much worse than the cost of a few bodyguards and doctors.
It might be interesting to think about reasons a whistleblower assassination could happen. (I found #6 below kinda interesting, because I didn't think of it immediately, but only once I started thinking through possibilities.) Non-exhaustive:
1. Warlord-like show of power, signaling that they're so strong they can openly act with impunity. Such as gratuitously using a military weapon not publicly available and on another country's soil, or a straight-faced coroner's determination of suicide by two self-inflicted gunshots to the back of the head before throwing self through a skyscraper window. (I don't see this in the Boeing situation.)
2. Powerful person lashing out due to mental illness instability/pettiness. Where there's no gain to be had, but their ego or other trigger was stepped upon. In the news in recent years, we've seen at least a couple powerful high-profile personalities who might fit the profile. (I don't see a connection to the Boeing situation.)
3. Prevent the whistleblower from testifying further. (I guess probably the cat's already out of the bag on the Boeing situation.)
4. Warning to other whistleblowers by that same entity, if further testimony could do more harm than has already been done. (Again, I guess probably the cat's out of the bag on Boeing.)
5. Lower-ranking individual's self-interest. Let's say there's no advantage to an organization or higher-up persons in assassinating a whistleblower, but... some lower-ranking person doesn't want to be implicated personally by something this whistleblower knows, or there is some unrelated mini-scandal that could be exposed as the whistleblower is interviewed. In general, I suspect that lower-ranking butt-covering is the source of massive number of problems and misbehavior in organizations, including all sorts of "coverup is worse than the crime" outcomes. (But I'd guess unlikely there's a big enough motivation for any lower-ranking individual connected to the Boeing situation to murder anyone over it.)
6. Uninvolved party sending a message to all high-profile whistleblowers. Let's say you're a powerful person, and evil (or imagining yourself serving some worthy cause through evildoing), and you're sitting on top of what could be a massive scandal, and you're vulnerable to whistleblowers. So, on the occasion of whistleblowers being in the news on some other high-profile scandal -- unrelated to you -- and possibly planting whistleblowing ideas among people who are a threat to you, you take the occasion to shift public sentiment about the desirability of whistleblowing in general. (Farfetched.)
7. Foreign sabotage, sowing social disorder. Make it look to people of the target country like their country is so corrupt that whistleblowers are assassinated openly and with impunity. (Farfetched, especially since we have so much erosion of trust already, I'm not sure we need any more pushes.)
Vs what are the chances any 40 year olds can die from the same causes in the same geographic area?
Damn, what a crazy coincidence.
Democratic republic and all its bodies working as intended
Boeing's on military welfare, like many companies. It has no need to actually produce civilian planes or make profits any more. So why not bump off whistleblowers? Anyway the era of air travel for the masses is coming to a close if you look at all the different plans being hatched to roll up environmental fees into flying which are designed to be unaffordable for ordinary people.
This'll definitely have a chilling effect for future witnesses, which is likely what they paid for.
How many are left?
Another one damn
The movie Michael Clayton springs to mind for some reason.
I cant put my tin foil hat on any harder boeing.
After the government swept Epstein’s client list under the rug (which, let me remind you, is full of alleged child rapists), nothing surprises me anymore. <Grabs popcorn before someone chimes in to defend USG’s profound lack of interest towards investigating people on the list />
To lose one whistleblower, Mr. Boeing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
It’s trivial to make someone’s cause of death appear completely natural if you know how. Even better if you know they have some pre-existing condition you could leverage.
Boeing getting “lucky” again
Okay, this is just nuts at this point.
I thought for a second what if the whistleblowers get into witness protection, then I looked up what planes the us Marshalls have ... It's not looking good for the whistleblowers.
Shit, im gonna play the devils advocate... Unless they forged the cause of death, we are indeed having a surge in pneumonia cases around the globe...
Is this a coincidemnce ? Or a pattern leading to an outlier ?
The Onion: "Boeing Promotes Mysterious Employee Known Only As ‘The Panther’": https://www.theonion.com/boeing-promotes-mysterious-employee...
As suspicious as this sounds, surely the amount of pressure he was under could lead to him to getting sick, then once in the hospital contracted the pneumonia and it all went downhill from there.
More coincidence? 3rd's the charm, when it will be a trend to investigate?
Whops...
I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.
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%.
I agree with you in that the population size is the key question here. However, I have two issues:
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...
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.
But the suggestion of foul play against boeing whistleblowers was made before the second boeing whistleblower died. The connection was pre-existing.
And that is quite irrelevant to the question of what are the odds either of them, in isolation, would die under suspicious circumstances.
I was unaware of such prediction, but it's unsurprising. In that case, it's the probability of one dying, which was no more unlikely than the first one.
...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.
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.
How do you figure this is suspicious circumstances? The pathology seems pretty reasonable, he got sick, developed pneumonia & MRSA, and ultimately suffered a stroke. It's not like he had radiation poisoning.
It's suspicious in that foul play can not be easily ruled out. It is plausible that someone could be deliberately infected with an infectious disease that has high odds of killing someone quickly. Conversely it's not plausible to say make a hurricane strike someone's house.
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.
I'm really trying to figure out where you got 53.29% from. Your formula is not only not how you'd calculate this, but gives 0.009. If you want to know the right answer, the easiest way is to do a binomial calculation, which is easiest using a calculator [1].
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%.
[1] - https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial
You're right. I screwed up the math.
So... it's extremely unlikely two would die in the same year from natural causes.
(given a pool of 100, not even 32!)
If we assume their base mortality rate is 0.1%, that the pool is only 100, and that the deaths are completely independent (and we know that since they were both whistleblowers, both worked for the sample employer, that may very well not be true), it's a low probability case, yes. The sense is that those are both extremely conservative numbers.
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.
Well luckily the mortality rate for 45-55 in the US is well-documented at 0.5%.
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 :)
I'm not sure why you think the 0.5% figure is relevant. One of them was 62. Even if they were both 45-55, their risk of death would no doubt be dramatically higher than the mean. They were both whistle blowers, and not just ordinary whistle blowers, but whistle blowers in a high profile story. IIRC, at least one of them had been fired from their job in the last year. That's not average for that age group.
Here is how to use the calculator, because you're still messing up the math a bit. We'll assume a 1% chance of death, and a population of 32.
---
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.
One of those people died of a gunshot wound, so whether it was self-inflicted or not, their age and health and any related statistics have nothing to do with the death.
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.
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.
There were 2 deaths from the population of known whistleblowers. If there are additional unknown whistleblowers, they still don't count as members of the population. There's no way to count deaths among unknown whistleblowers.
"I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning."
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.
And if someone had predicted ahead of time that the second dead boeing whistleblower would have a first name starting with J that would have been quite astounding. But since we are waiting until after the two whistleblowers are dead and then choosing something we already know they have in common, no it is not any less probable.
I'd say it was exceedingly rare for people in that cohort to die suddenly without warning. Now, though?
and one died after ventilation?
2 down 30 to go.
I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.
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.
32 whistleblowers in the last 3 years
That’s a lot of assassinations! I bet Boeing gets a volume discount.
I assume he meant there were 32, of which those two died, not 32 died.
If 32 died, ok, they're killing people. If 2/32 died, that's within the realm of possibility.
Yes, it is 2 dead out of 32 total [1].
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...
[2] - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
the deaths happened in two months. not in the space of a year. you need to take that in account.
I think that would be a statistical mistake to cherry-pick the cutoff like that. What would be the argument for ignoring the X months/years beforehand in which no one died?
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.
That is an excellent point. Maybe the math has to be using the average length of time the whistleblowers have been 'out' as it were. That could plausibly end up being several years, which pushes the 1:32 number a lot closer to 'certain' and the 2:32 number way up into entirely plausible.
Wouldn't it be fair to distinguish between the baseline probability of any death, and the baseline probability of a death that could plausibly be suspicious, such as gunshot suicide?
Sure, this was back of the napkin math and there will be plenty of ways to improve it. The problem is that the more details you add, the more difficult it will be to find actual numbers to put on these things as opposed to using the above actuarial tables if we lump all deaths together.
And for what it is worth, one of these deaths would be in the "suspicious" category and one wouldn't.
So what you’re saying is that there’s a 96% chance Boeing did it. If that doesn't conclusively settle the matter, I don't know what would.
Boeing would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for us meddling hackers!
Usually below 5% chance is considered statistically significant.
I always love people who actually do the math.
Thank you!
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.
Out of how many wistleblowers? How does that compare to other people with the same demographics?
(I can't edit or delete anymore but see the sibling comments. 32 is the total, not the dead.)
People should stop and do some very serious investigation about a company that has 32 whistleblowers just in the last 3 years....
Stop what? The very serious investigations that are happening?
Where did you get that number?
Where did you get that number from? Do you have links?
Not to mention how old some of them must be.
well this guy was 45 and described as healthy in the article, but shows up to the hospital with a mysterious lung problem and then gets MRSA
it's not exactly a smoking gun but you can't blame the guy's age, either. 45 is just middle age, I hope
The chance to die from all causes at the age of 45 is 0.41% https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
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.
People can easily be paranoid and suicidal at the same time.
Heck, I bet that Venn diagram has quite a lot of overlap indeed.
Actuarial tables are for all people. So it also of course includes deaths from cancer, obesity related diseases, alcoholism/drug abuse, etc. The odds of a healthy 45 year old just randomly dying from a mysterious infection are going to be orders of magnitude lower than 0.41%.
Per year. If the whistleblowers have been known for several years, then it's not just the current year that counts.
Does anyone know if they're investigating that? It was supposedly in his car, in the hotel parking lot he was staying at for the deposition. Seems implausible there wasn't a security camera somewhere in the vicinity.
A friend died at 40 from lung cancer despite never smoking. It's rare but it happens. How many proven assassinations of corporate whistleblowers have happened in the US? I think it's zero in the last 100 years at least.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...
Assassinations of corporate whistleblowers also falls under the category of "it's rare but it happens."
I mean, that's not exactly the same. These guys were running a local tree-cutting serving, not a Fortune 500. 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.
I imagine Boeing can do anything a local tree-cutting service can do.
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.
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.
As someone who crossed 45 not that long ago, I gotta say that I have definitely noticed an uptick in people dying who I'm acquainted with.
In my opinion it's highly unlikely he was murdered, however if he was, personally, I would be more inclined to pin the blame on an adversary of the Americans to sew some distrust vs Boeing or it's shareholders.
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.
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.
Indeed. In my home town we had the ‘metric martyr’, a greengrocer who defied EU law and continued selling bananas in metric measures.
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-...
An actual arrest seems wildly disproportionate for this. Simple administrative fines should have been enough
Even fines seem wildly disproportionate. Its one thing to regulate how one interacts with the gocernment, it is quite a lot less appropriate for government to regulate private transactions when the validity is easily and cheaply verifiable by either party.
Regulating weights and measures is a basic function of government since Babylonian times.
Sure but dictating what units to use is a bit overboard. A pound should be a pound and a kilo a kilo but what units I use in commerce is my business, not the state’s.
One of the main roles of governments is regulating private transactions.
Also, he should have done what every supermarket does around here and sell bananas at a flat price per bunch.
Probably in imperial measures? Unless bananas were somehow sold in metric grams and the EU imposed some weird unit I don't know about.
Yup, you're right. From the link:
Brain fart from me, yep!
It would have been a lot easier for him if he had simply sold the bananas at a flat per-banana price. That's typically how many grocery stores in the US sell them (notably Trader Joe's). Here in Japan, they typically sell them in small bunches for a fixed price, with the small bananas sold at a lower price (for a group of 3 or 4) and the larger ones at a higher price next to them. There's no need to weigh bananas at the point at the point of sale at all.
To be pedantic though, refusing to comply with a recently-passed law is not whistleblowing; it is civil disobedience.
"The appeal failed in 2002 and Steven returned to work but things for him and the country were never the same again. He died aged 39 after a heart attack in 2004 leaving a widow, Leigh, their young children Georgia and Jay and a son Rhys from a previous relationship. Leigh also passed away in 2017."
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.
That’s an awful lot of BS to swallow. I know the blue pill is nice and all. But just know, the day you finally doubt what you’ve typed, the red pill is there waiting for you when you’re ready to see fact over fiction. But I warn and caution you in hopes of deterring you: the Truth is usually more depressing than the fantasy.
The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...
My ex killed herself not long after telling me she wasn't suicidal. This may surprise you, but suicidal people often lie about being suicidal. Or, they rapidly go from not being suicidal to being so. Or, due to mental illness, they've lost a grip on reality.
This is a little different, he literally said to his friend, "I ain't scared but if anything happens to me it's not suicide."
Not leaning either way, but there was a famous case about a lawyer in Guatemala who recorded a video message claiming he wasn't suicidal and that the government was out to kill him. He was killed days later and the video was released. The country was (briefly) thrown in to turmoil. A few days later it came out that he had ordered a hit on himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Rosenberg_Marzano
That article is an absolute hodgepodge of statements and retractions, but the same hitman appears to have also killed the laywer's clients, who were causing problems for the regime. That seems like pretty strong evidence that it wasn't a suicide by hitman, unless the lawyer also had his own clients killed?
Wasn't there an old movie about this scenario? Guy orders a hit on himself, decides actually he wants to live?
I'd never considered a technique to strengthen your argument. Put in that light -- it makes it more plausible.
He was also in the middle of testifying against the company that had made his life hell for years. That is a rather strange time to kill yourself.
I don’t know, it was presumably extremely stressful. Extremely stressful events or when a lot of people kill them themselves.
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
Mental health is not a logical thing. Try telling someone who's in their darkest moments to just look on the bright side. It doesn't work.
This game of telephone is absurd.
His family has said no such thing. A proclaimed "friend of the family" claimed he told her this.
If only mental health were that simple. Many people aren't suicidal until it gets too much and then the thoughts take over
Everything is going to die eventually.
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".
Unlikely things happen. And there have been more than two (former) Boeing employees who have come forward, most of whom managed to survive.
Corporations also conspire, especially those deeply embedded in the military industrial complex.
Corporations conspiring to kill not just one but several undesirable employees is very rare. Actually, I don't really know of any other example.
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.
You show zero imagination here. All you need is someone powerful that doesn’t want to be implicated.
Describing what one can have readily seen on Netflix is not a display of imagination
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.
We know less about what's happening internally
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?
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.
'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?
No you don't know of any other companies doing this. Nobody does. And in a few years, nobody will even remember this either. Whistle blowers, or witnesses, against powerful interests have this habit of constantly dying in really exceptional circumstances. And there's never any proof available that it was anything other than just extremely rare events, happening constantly, and in a very small population of people. Go figure.
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.'
That was a slick transformation, I wonder if anyone noticed.
Were they presented as an argument, or merely as a factual observation?
How many would have to die under these circumstances for you to consider they're not natural deaths?
As many as it takes to leave even a shred of evidence.
Q: How many witches have to burn before you accept that inquisition is doing something wrong?
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-68881821
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.
Apologies, I put my argument across poorly.
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.
That doesn't make any sense. You're calling someone ignorant for favoring evidence over hearsay and hysteria. That's the exact opposite of witch trials, where the whole concept is finding guilt without evidence.
at LEAST one more...then i'll raise an eyebrow!
OR, we are living in a simulation and this is just a joke.
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
omg lol https://www.businessinsider.com/missing-delta-emergency-slid...
You have to remember that anything about Boeing gets clicks, and immediately engage your critical thinking. The Boeing 767 has been in production for over 40 years, and at this point is very nearly out of production aside from a few that are built each year for cargo use. The plane in question is 33 years old. A typical airliner lifespan is 20-25 years. Any problem with a plane of that age is maintenance, not design.
In my subset of aviation the end user is only to follow manufacturer approved maintenance guidelines, with no deviations. So I believe it's not a critical thinking problem, as much as a distinct lack of domain knowledge in comments like these.
Yea but the slide landed in the backyards of a lawyer suing Boeing.
It's a bit more than just "OMG BOEING PLANES FALLING APART" clickbait. Lol.
It's the universe fucking with us.
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.
I guess what’s missing is the denominator. How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? It’s a nice little math problem.
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.
You are ignoring literally every other variable, especially the ones that are likely common to whistleblowers in general, Boeing employees in general, and Boeing whistleblowers in particular.
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?
That’s why I said the denominator is important. If you hit a home run on your first at bat it doesn’t mean you can bat 1000 the whole season.
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.
45 y/o and healthy though?
No-one is truly healthy. Everything is a game of statistics
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.
well yeah but the previous whistleblower committed suicide after literally telling his family "If anything happens to me it's not suicide".
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.
Sure, but how many people are whistleblowers about Boeing misbehavior. I would guess at most a hundred, the chances that two of them die in such a short time seems low. What are the odds that an apparently healthy person just drops dead in two weeks over the span of maybe two years. Certainly seems somewhat unlikely.
In the absence of data everyone is apparently healthy. That’s the point. There are more mundane explanations than a Boeing assassination conspiracy.
This one might be, but the first one is almost certainly no suicide.
This is not alleged as a suicide. It was acute bacterial infection.
The proper comparison is not the size of the employee pool over a human lifespan its the size of the list of people actively advocating or publicly known to be testifying against Boeing over the course of a month.
That's extremely tautological.
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.
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.