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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzdegree in bamf
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    6 months ago

    Take for example, here is a map of active fires around the globe, right now:

    By “fires” do they mean fores fires? Controlled fires to burn crops, or burn land to clear it for crops? House fires? Bonfires? Campfires? Fires in fireplaces?

    Ignition is a fundamental for fire to happen, and humans cause WAY more ignition events than nature does.

    A car causes hundreds of ignition effects per minute. But, I’m guessing you mean a certain kind of ignition?

    The timing and frequency of these events directly influence the frequency of fires.

    The timing and frequency of things like lighting a fire directly influence the frequency of fires? Do you mean the frequency of out-of-control fires? Because otherwise that seems like a pretty obvious conclusion.




  • Whoever wrote that note isn’t great at communication.

    “The refrigerator is currently heating items.” Ok… does this mean it is broken? Or is the heating intentional and this is just a warning not to put things in it that you don’t want heated up? Is this heating up phase meant to stop anytime soon?

    “Thank you for your time and consideration,” for what? Reading the note? Is this a request that the refrigerator be fixed? Or is it merely a warning to other people? If we’re meant to assume that the fridge is broken, has someone in charge been informed?




  • Anyone can find a hitman online

    Yes, and many people who try are caught in a sting operation by the police.

    https://abcnews.go.com/2020/newlywed-thirty-years-murder-sting/story?id=13836957

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RentAHitman.com

    https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/alleged-hit-man-plotting-nyc-murder-arrested-in-fbi-sting-with-guns-ammo-old-man-mask/4144188/

    Especially when they could always hire a person to do that for them. Do they trust anyone at all, with any of their criminal shenanigans?

    Yes, and that’s the problem. This isn’t the sort of thing an executive would do on their own without talking to other execs about it. If they did that they’d have to trust that the other execs would back them up and not turn them in. And, this is a real, serious crime. This isn’t a crime where the company has to pay a fine. This is a crime where they would personally be liable for conspiracy to commit murder.

    These massive, systemic changes that made Boeing go from trusted airline to killing whistleblowers weren’t the actions of one man.

    Exactly my point. Those took a whole group of executives discussing their plans openly in meetings. They wouldn’t discuss actually breaking the law in meetings like that. Instead, they’d talk about who they’d have to lobby to get the laws changed how they wanted, what pressure they could put on regulators, what kinds of PR campaigns they’d need to run, etc. Those are things that people might see as dishonest and unethical, but they’re all legal. If someone in the meeting objected to the decisions, they’d have a little debate and then some decision would be made. The other execs wouldn’t have to worry that the conversation would leak and they’d be charged with serious crimes. If the conversation leaked there might be a bit of embarrassment, they’d have to hire a PR firm, and done.

    The decisions they made almost certainly cost lives, but even if you had transcripts for those meetings, even an ambitious prosecutor probably couldn’t find any actual crimes being committed. The execs at Boeing almost all have finance backgrounds, so most of the meetings would have been about money, and how much they could save while keeping an “acceptable safety margin” – which we might not think is acceptable, but they’d have the lawyers to argue that it was acceptable.

    You don’t go from open discussions about how to increase profits by outsourcing work to discussing how to hire a hitman to kill one of your whistleblowers. That’s suddenly stuff where the people in the room would be chargeable for conspiracy to commit murder.

    The Mitchell & Webb parody proves my point. Removing Webb’s character makes it back into a movie scenario. His character shows just how ludicrous those movie scenes really are. At some point when murder is being discussed, someone is going to actually have to check “just to be clear, you mean murder, right?”. Because you’re not going to order to have someone murdered just because the CFO used an ambiguous term.




  • If that’s “white collar crime” then so is hiring a hitman.

    No, it isn’t. If you hire a hitman you can be tried for conspiracy to commit murder. If you approve a system that could be unsafe for an airplane, your company might have to pay a fine. They’re vastly different crimes, even if one results in a lot more deaths.

    You’re being rather naive

    You watch too many movies.

    Sure, those bosses would have a hard time doing violence on other people, personally. But through another person? Nah

    They might have the mindset required to hire a hitman. But, they don’t have the connections. They also don’t want to take on the personal liability of doing that. These are almost all finance guys who have MBAs. They wouldn’t make a decision like this on their own, and they wouldn’t be able to talk about it in a board meeting without risking a conspiracy charge.

    The MCAS decision is ridiculous, but it exactly the kind of thing they can discuss in a board meeting without risking criminal charges. Even if the meeting had been recorded, the transcript would be boring board-room talk, nothing that they could be indicted for.




  • They are not military, but they have plenty of contacts there.

    They may have contracts with generals, but not much in the way with soldiers on the ground. If it were a defence contractor that made small arms, then maybe. But, this is Boeing.

    Illegal recreational drugs are not uncommon in the business world

    Sure… but executives don’t go to the bad parts of town to get them. The guy they’re buying from is most likely someone who can travel in C-Suite circles and not draw attention. Maybe they’re also a member of the golf club and have a legitimate business as a cover. The execs aren’t getting in their Mercedes and cruising down to the ghetto to score. The dealers may have connections to organized crime, but not in a way that is obvious to anyone.

    Hey, who knows, maybe some of those execs started working many years ago as humble machine gun and bazooka salespeople.

    We know, their profiles are public.

    The Boeing CEO, David L. Calhoun:

    After graduating from college, Calhoun was hired by General Electric (GE). He decided to join GE in part because he would be working in Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania, where he grew up.[3] He worked at GE for 26 years, overseeing transportation, aircraft engines, reinsurance, lighting and other GE units, before being appointed vice chairman and a member of GE’s Board of Directors in 2005.[

    The COO, Stephanie Pope:

    Pope was an Eisenhower Fellow in Brussels and Ireland in 2008 and has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Southwest Missouri State University and a Master of Business Administration from Lindenwood University.

    Pope joined Boeing in 1994 and rose through the ranks to take on senior-level roles at all three of the company’s key businesses.

    The CFO, Brian West:

    West received a bachelor’s degree in finance from Siena College and a Master of Business Administration from the Columbia Business School.

    Previously, West spent 16 years at General Electric, where he served as chief financial officer of GE Aviation and chief financial officer of GE Engine Services.

    The Chair, Supply Chain Operations Council, William A. Ampofo II:

    Ampofo has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Adelphi University and a Master of Business Administration from George Washington University.

    Before joining The Boeing Company in April 2016, Ampofo spent 22 years at United Technologies Corporation (UTC), holding roles of increasing responsibility in finance, information technology, corporate strategy and operations at its corporate headquarters and its Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky and UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS) divisions.

    Just look through their execs and find anybody with even a hint of dirt under their fingernails:

    https://www.boeing.com/company/bios

    It is not infrequent to see executives caring only about their profits, even in detriment of the company as a whole.

    Sure, so they hire PR firms, and private investigators, and call up friendly reporters to try to get them to publish a negative article. They aren’t going to order a hit and make it look like a suicide.


  • So what do you mean by white collar crime?

    It’s a pretty well defined term.

    Does it include killing people or not?

    It may mean being responsible for their deaths, but not in a way in which you could be charged for murder.

    Also there os myriads of examples from today, where western companies directly or indirectly order people to get killed

    Almost always indirectly, and almost never on US soil. Not hiring a hitman to stage a suicide in the US. The kinds of things that US corporations do are the kinds of things they can talk about at board meetings without worrying that they’ll go to jail of the meeting is bugged. They can talk about hiring SecuriCo in Zambia to deal with unrest at the mine. Or, they can talk with hiring the law firm Goldman, Burke and Mott to deal with the bad PR from the whistleblower. They’re not going to chat about going onto a dark web server to hire a hit man to kill a whistleblower. That’s movie stuff, not reality.