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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 positi
by bioneuralnet 2y ago
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.
- michaelmrose 2y agoThe 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.
- graywh 2y ago32 whistleblowers in the last 3 years
- throwup238 2y agoThat’s a lot of assassinations! I bet Boeing gets a volume discount.
- mattmaroon 2y agoI 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.
- slg 2y agoYes, 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-of-32-whistleblower-complaints-documents-reveal https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o... [2] - https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
- throwup238 2y agoSo 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!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- amelius 2y agoThank you!
- foxyv 2y agoI always love people who actually do the math.
- ekianjo 2y ago> The odds of at least 1 of the 32 dying would be 28% and the odds of 2 dying would be 4%. the deaths happened in two months. not in the space of a year. you need to take that in account.
- slg 2y agoI 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.
- rootusrootus 2y agoThat 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.
- blueelephanttea 2y ago> If 2/32 died 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.
- orblivion 2y agoOut of how many wistleblowers? How does that compare to other people with the same demographics?
- orblivion 2y ago(I can't edit or delete anymore but see the sibling comments. 32 is the total, not the dead.)
- tootie 2y agoWhere did you get that number?
- coliveira 2y agoPeople should stop and do some very serious investigation about a company that has 32 whistleblowers just in the last 3 years....
- mulmen 2y agoStop what? The very serious investigations that are happening?
- dustfinger 2y agoWhere did you get that number from? Do you have links?
- danielfoster 2y agoNot to mention how old some of them must be.
- dingnuts 2y agowell 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
- neom 2y agoIn 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cft 2y agoThe chance to die from all causes at the age of 45 is 0.41% https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html 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.
- danielfoster 2y agoPeople can easily be paranoid and suicidal at the same time.
- rootusrootus 2y agoHeck, I bet that Venn diagram has quite a lot of overlap indeed.
- 2y ago
- CrazyPyroLinux 2y ago> (apparent) suicide The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...
- mattmaroon 2y agoMy 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.
- shepardrtc 2y agoThis is a little different, he literally said to his friend, "I ain't scared but if anything happens to me it's not suicide."
- nathancahill 2y agoNot 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Rosenberg_Marzano
- kenjackson 2y agoI'd never considered a technique to strengthen your argument. Put in that light -- it makes it more plausible.
- lordnacho 2y agoWasn't there an old movie about this scenario? Guy orders a hit on himself, decides actually he wants to live?
- 2y ago
- delfinom 2y agoOR, 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
- paul7986 2y agoomg lol https://www.businessinsider.com/missing-delta-emergency-slide-found-by-lawyer-suing-boeing-2024-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/missing-delta-emergency-slid...
- rootusrootus 2y agoYou 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.
- snypher 2y agoIn 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.
- NekkoDroid 2y ago> Any problem with a plane of that age is maintenance, not design. 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.
- delfinom 2y agoYea 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.
- sunshine_reggae 2y ago[flagged]
- xhkkffbf 2y agoNot to be cynical or make any claim about this particular case, but if a person were going to commit suicide as a kind of FU to someone, then it seems like making this kind of statement before adds an extra layer of FU.
- lobf 2y agoIf this were true it should be trivial to prove. Can you cite anything?
- dralley 2y agoNo, he did not. This is literally false. Someone who claims they are a "close family friend" who talked with him occasionally "at get-togethers, birthdays, celebrations and whatnot" told a local news affiliate that he told her that in private. Which is something quite different from him personally reaching out to the local news affiliate and telling them that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- akira2501 2y ago> every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually) That's extremely tautological. > it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred. 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. > and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent. 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sxg 2y agoI'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning. > With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues So many? Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.
- cbsmith 2y ago> I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning. 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%.
- peter422 2y agoOne 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.
- cbsmith 2y ago> 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.
- cbsmith 2y ago> 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. 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.
- jen729w 2y agoIndeed. 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-martyrs-20-years-how-20340101 https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/metric-...
- riffraff 2y ago> continued selling bananas in metric measures. Probably in imperial measures? Unless bananas were somehow sold in metric grams and the EU imposed some weird unit I don't know about.
- autoexecbat 2y agoAn actual arrest seems wildly disproportionate for this. Simple administrative fines should have been enough
- coldtea 2y agoEverything 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".
- arp242 2y agoUnlikely things happen. And there have been more than two (former) Boeing employees who have come forward, most of whom managed to survive.
- exoverito 2y agoCorporations also conspire, especially those deeply embedded in the military industrial complex.
- arp242 2y agoCorporations 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.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> 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 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.
- behringer 2y agoThis one might be, but the first one is almost certainly no suicide.
- tootie 2y agoThis is not alleged as a suicide. It was acute bacterial infection.
- gitaarik 2y agoYeah, they played safe with this one.
- constantcrying 2y agoSure, 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.
- mulmen 2y agoIn the absence of data everyone is apparently healthy. That’s the point. There are more mundane explanations than a Boeing assassination conspiracy.
- squigz 2y agoHow many would have to die under these circumstances for you to consider they're not natural deaths?
- volkk 2y agoat LEAST one more...then i'll raise an eyebrow!
- mulmen 2y agoAs many as it takes to leave even a shred of evidence.
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoQ: 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 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-68881821
- rootusrootus 2y ago> i.e. You are just staying wilfully ignorant 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.
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoApologies, 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tomca32 2y agowell 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.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago> well yeah but the previous whistleblower committed suicide after literally telling his family "If anything happens to me it's not suicide". I mean if I had dedicated my life to taking Boeing down and was contemplating suicide, I'd consider saying that too.
- gitaarik 2y agoThat's a ridiculous idea. If you commit suicide because of years of depression that you can't get out of and don't have any positive outlook on the future, you wouldn't care about wisleblowing and bringing some bad rep to a company. And especially you wouldn't cover up your suicide. You wouldn't want to lie to your family about the cause of your dead just to get back at some company you worked for. I don't think this is a good theory. I don't see the logic in that. Much more logical if he was assassinated because he was spreading info that people with big money didn't want out.
- janalsncm 2y agoI 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 2y agoYou 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?
- janalsncm 2y agoThat’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.
- mulmen 2y agoWhy would there need to be 100k whistleblowers? That’s not how actuarial tables work. They’re normalized to a population of 100k, that doesn’t mean they’re derived from a population of 100k. Yes, reality is complex and messy and confusing and we often don’t have data to describe it. That’s why it’s important to know when we are dealing with relevant facts and when we are constructing a spherical cow out of scraps in their absence.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vicary 2y ago45 y/o and healthy though?
- ChrisRR 2y agoNo-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.
- andreygrehov 2y agoNot that I disagree with you, but since the is the most upvoted comment - had this happened in, say, Russia, people would say: "The bloody Putin's totalitarianism!". But in the US, well: "[...] every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die". This is absolutely hilarious and deserves the best comment of the year award.