• Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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    7 months ago

    EDIT: I should’ve read the article, but I’m taking the L and leaving this up with a strikethrough. The phrasing “after” in the headline definitely creates the wrong impression here. As for what this says about people, I guess we’ll have to see if the other ten whistleblowers still testify.

    And if you think it’s too much to assume Boeing killed these two people, that’s the wrong question. It matters more whether as a fellow whistleblower it’s reasonable to worry about whether Boeing killed them, and I think it is.

    Also Boeing definitely killed the first guy at least. “If I die, it’s not suicide.” - man who “committed suicide”. WTAF.

    If you ever hear anyone talking about how humans suck and we’re all terrible and will definitely destroy ourselves, just think about the fact that killing whistleblowers was quickly followed by more whistleblowers. Not just lone heros, but ten fucking people said, “hey, fuck you, are you really gonna kill me too?” knowing that the answer could well be “yes”.

      • parpol@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        Guy who said “If I die, it is not suicide” dies of suicide right before important court date, and perfectly healthy and active person suddenly succumbs to rare antibiotics-resistant infection.

        They just happened to work at the same company and die right before they could testify on the same thing.

        This not being foul play is less likely than a global conspiracy.

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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          7 months ago

          Yes. What you are listing are coincidences.

          Also understand that it is pretty rare for a whistleblower to have any future in the industry they are blowing the whistle on. That is throwing away years of schooling and often decades of experience. People tend to not do that if they aren’t already ill and not expecting a long life.

          As for “if I die, it is not suicide”: Gonna get real dark for a moment. A lot of people are just looking for a way to make their life, or death, matter. Someone realizing they don’t want to put themselves and their family through a very long trial might very well use that as an excuse to take the easy way out.

          All that said: Obviously these need to be investigated. But there is a big difference between investigating a suspicious death and immediately jumping to conspiracy.

          • parpol@programming.dev
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            7 months ago

            Even looking at it from a statistical perspective, these are low chances.

            Let’s do the numbers.

            Suicide rate is 14 / 100,000 (0.00014).

            Deaths from MRSA in the US in 2017 was 20,000 / 325,100,000 (0.000062).

            The chance of either happening to one person is 0.000202 (0.02%). The chance of it happening to 2/12 whistleblowers in the same year is:

            1-((1−(14÷100,000))×(1−(20,000÷325,100,000)))^6 =

            0.00120845658 (0.12%),

            1 out of 826 cases with 12 whistleblowers would have this outcome.

              • parpol@programming.dev
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                7 months ago

                You don’t compare the stats to the population in its entirety

                You do for disease and suicide as it can happen to literally anyone.

                If working for a specific company or being a whistleblower affects those statistics, the company should be held responsible anyway.

                  • parpol@programming.dev
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                    7 months ago

                    From what is currently known about the two whistleblowers neither were particularly at higher risk of suicide or MRSA. The person who died of MRSA was healthy and active with no history of hospitalization whatsoever. Close friends of the first whistleblower claim that suicide was very unlike him, and his previous statement of “if anything happens, it wasn’t suicide” strengthens that.

                    There are other commenters here speculating that being a whistleblower makes you at higher risk of suicide, but there are no official statistics on that, so it is at most speculation, therefore I need to use general statistics.

                    All probabilistic models and datasets eventually get replaced with more accurate ones, but that doesn’t discredit them until then.

        • OpenStars@discuss.online
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          7 months ago

          Tbf the evidence for the second person is not strong - that stuff does legit happen.

          But the first guy? Damn! That’s enough right there.

          • Tryptaminev@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Well isn’t there a ruling in aircraft design and safety, that you calculate the probability of a certain failure and judge by its reoccurence if it was just random, or more than likely systematic?

            I think i read this in context to the two MAX planes crashing in the exact same way. The first one was ruled as maybe just being some very very freak thing to happen, but it happening twice made it entirely implausible to be without systematic cause.

            And well now it is happening twice in a few years with Boeing that weird things happen twice in a row with little time in between in relation to critical security flaws.

            • OpenStars@discuss.online
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              7 months ago

              Well isn’t there a ruling in aircraft design and safety, that you calculate the probability of a certain failure and judge by its reoccurence if it was just random, or more than likely systematic?

              It sounds like neither of us know the answer to that, so I choose not to comment on that matter.

              I think i read this in context to the two MAX planes crashing in the exact same way.

              But how does that apply? One guy was a “suicide”, the other was bacteria - you just said it yourself, the metric only works if they crash “in the exact same way”, therefore by your own words, this seems to not apply?

              There is a natural human bias to want to “know” things. Sometimes we even make shit up out of desperation to fill that void, but the more honest way (but HARD to do, emotionally, as in it seriously goes against the grain of our pattern-finding brain’s natural instinctual algorithms) is to simply say “I do not know the answer here”. Please don’t misunderstand me as saying that it is likely that the second guy was not killed - that would be 100% tangential to what I am trying to convey!

              Rather, I am saying that the first guy looks to have been Epstein-ed, but we don’t know enough yet about the second guy. Could you imagine someone sent to kill him, and having a whole plan in place so that he wouldn’t even make it home but rather be taken care of in the car on the way there, but then he dies in his hospital bed first -> do you still get paid!?:-P Asking the important questions here!!:-D

              But again, what happened to the first guy is already enough to know that some shady shit is going on. And yeah, that should make us think twice about the second guy… but having done so, I think that we just don’t know enough there to make a firm determination like we could for the first guy, without additional evidence. Which does not absolve Boeing one iota for being so shitty for the last few years.

              • Tryptaminev@lemm.ee
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                7 months ago

                I agree, that we cannot rule either death to be an assassination by itself. But their distinct occurrence in this context, e.g. that they prevent whistleblowers from testifying warrants an in depth investigation into both of them. In particular given the circumstances it is sketchy if Police or other officials are eager to close the case and rule it as non assassinations, without actually analyzing what was going on.

                • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                  7 months ago

                  I don’t know the relevant laws there - but I am certain that an autopsy would have been done? Beyond that, what more could be done? If that means a more expensive autopsy, then yeah they should do that - even Boeing might agree on that point, to help absolve them, even if they did somehow give the bacteria to the guy, but like if they were confident that it could not be traced to them in that manner.

                  Speaking of, even if they were guilty in this second case, that’s a very different thing than someone being able to prove it. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a foundational bedrock principle in the USA, and we cannot simply throw that away without losing something precious.

                  And with them being military contractors, they probably have classified status to where local police can’t just go subpoenaing their records willy nilly. I could be wrong though. Then again, if they are used to dealing with the likes of e.g. literal Russian spies, then surely they would be smart enough to not leave a paper trail on something like this to begin with?

                  But the first guy should already be enough to start an investigation. The second guy… I dunno what that one means, maybe yes but also might not be.