After death of Joshua Dean & John Barnett, their lawyers are concerned about the possibility that around 10 more Boeing whistleblowers may suffer the same fate.
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”.
Funny, just yesterday probably I was arguing with someone in another thread that was saying the people here don’t actually think Boeing had these whistleblowers killed, it was just making “implications and jokes.”
And here, very clearly, with a massive number of upvotes we have someone claiming that Boeing had them killed and that resulted in brave souls coming out afterward. lol
However, this also exposes another huge complaint I have with your typical lemmy-er (lemming? lemmite? what do you call a user of lemmy?): Almost no one reads the fucking article.
This isn’t about new whistleblowers coming out, but their lawyer claiming he is afraid that current whistle blowers will be “scared away.”
But, of course, what I’ve learned on reddit and even more so on lemmy is that the facts don’t matter, only the narrative.
When I first started on reddit many years ago, while it was clear some people didn’t read the article, usually the top comment in the thread usually showed that they read the article, unless it was some kind joke. Over time it definitely got worse.
I was hoping when jumping to Lemmy that I would be able to recapture some of that magic.
Lemmy has a lot of good things going for it, but what I got in that regard is the top comment, with 100% upvotes, clearly not having read the article and spewing some unsubstantiated conspiratorial claims. It’s like being in r/conspiracy sometimes.
Yes, varying people have different opinions on subjects. It is easy to think a comment with upvotes is the way the hivemind goes, but the hivemind has multiple factions.
I, personally, have no opinion on the matter. The dude was septic and had a stroke. While it seems unlikely that was murder, I guess it is possible if you have infinite resources to make it look natural. But that is one HELL of a coincidence to have two whistle-blowers die . … like. … pretty fucking insane. Watch these next ten all die and no one important bats an eye.
I was talking to someone the other day who was really bent out of shape over an extremely unpleasant customer. The kind of interaction that sticks with you for years.
I told my perspective on people. We tend to remember remarkable things - stuff that really stands out from the normal. The news media does the same thing. Normal, everyday stuff isn’t “newsworthy.”
So when an asshole customer stands out that much, it’s because it’s such a rare experience. People are mostly good, so the goodness doesn’t stand out.
Yeah, bad customers can ruin your day, but I remember doing customer service that one good customer with a nice smile can make your day good again. That’s why I always make an effort to be as nice as possible.
Yes but our current society vests power in the corporation doing the killing. It’s a problem as old as civilization, but one we still haven’t solved. The problem is that these institutions and the technology they wield has never been greater.
We need an impartial lawnmower. Something external to the species that comes in and cuts the biggest ones in half. And it needs to be incorruptible and powerful enough to do this.
This is a leap. You can be a good person and also see that people as a whole can be both wonderful and absolutely terrible. This is a story about a mega corp murdering two whistleblowers, so far. In this case, the people involved in making this a headline suck and are terrible.
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.
We do ourselves no favors by sounding like conspiracy nutjobs who are uninterested in facts. When they go low, we should retain the high road, imho.
Edit: this… basically means tangentially what I had intended to say, so it is better off to be deleted, though I will leave it as strikethrough for the historical record (I really hate all those “deleted” messages, and don’t want to contribute one of my own too!).
I apologize for my wording - I agree with you that I was out of line. There was some point I was trying to make, about the need to be cautious with our wording, but somehow I ended up doing the exact thing I was trying to warn about, didn’t I? Fwiw I don’t actually think that you suck at all - I was just really, Really, REALLY bad at expressing myself there.:-) Thank you for not returning the favor in like manner.
Yes if you’re including the entire population (which is not how stats works) as his demographic is exponentially more at risk than many others (age, onset of pneumonia, etc)
You don’t just take the entire population and calculate the odds that they will contract and/or die of something. For instance, I could trivialize bike injuries/deaths in the US because countless people do not commute regularly on their bikes. Hell tens of millions don’t even have one and haven’t ridden a bike since they were children. The stat isn’t super useful unless we are discussing how many regular cyclists get hurt. Otherwise countless non-cyclists dilute the useful information - if they don’t ride bikes, they aren’t at risk at all. And that’s not even taking into account locale. Different population densities,topographies, etc. have different risks. But we can set that aside for now as I think you likely get what I’m driving at there.
MRSA affects more specific demographics and conditions. Somebody who is older who contracts pneumonia and enters a hospital is far more likely than the average population to contract it - and it has a 10-20% lethality which is extremely high - so their risk has to be assessed in that context.
If we only compared it against the general population, then hospitals would simply go “well in the grand scheme of things not many people die of MRSA.“ When what they’re (correctly) saying is “if you are elderly and have pneumonia we need to really watch out for MRSA.” Because that is a real risk.
At 45 he’s not elderly but he’s within the range we see with MRSA unfortunately and pneumonia is a huge trigger for it (compromised immune system open to secondary infection). It’s incredibly resistant to antibiotics/cleaning supplies and is a real killer. Because hospitals clean so much it’s actually more likely to happen there than in “the real world“ because it gets selected out.
So he isn’t super young (least contributing factor), he has pneumonia (big contributing factor), and is in a hospital (where it almost exclusively occurs). His odds were higher than that of the general population the same way if you go skydiving you have a higher chance of dying from falling to your death than the average population.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There can be far more done than just an autopsy in the second case. Is there a register who has entered and left the building? Is there camera footage showing anyone accessing the room that had no business being there? Is there anything unusual in the nurses schedules? Were all procedures followed according to the rules, especially sanitary rules?
These are all things that should be investigated. If they show no signs of irregularities then the case can be closed. If there is irregularities, then these need to be investigated further, and then the question of motive comes into play, where there is one party with a very strong motive to silence the guy.
Circumstantial evidence - relies on an inference to connect it to the conclusion (e.g. guy saying before hand he won’t kill himself).
Direct evidence - no additional inference/evidence is needed (e.g. video of a guy going up to the car and shooting him).
The guy saying he won’t kill himself requires inferring that he’s being truthful when he said it and that he didn’t change his mind. It’s not non-evidence, it does point to suicide being less likely. But it’s far from conclusive. If there’s no sign of entering the vehicle or that a struggle occurred, then I’d argue that far outweighs his prior statement.
They just happened to work at the same company and die right before they could testify on the same thing.
That’s also a common misunderstanding, at least regarding the first (I’m not as familiar with the second). I’m a bit unclear on the details of the deposition - which side wanted it and was asking the questions, etc. (detailed here) but whatever the case, it was Boeing that demanded he come back for one more day. So if Boeing wanted him to not testify that day, they’d just send him home as originally planned. The only reason they’d do it then was to silence him generally…but doing it in a way that draws so much suspicion to them seems like an implausibly bad decision. Then again, it is Boeing. (Note that this is also circumstantial evidence, and requires assuming that Boeing isn’t so dumb as to kill a witness in the middle of their own deposition, which may not be warranted).
Edit: corrected my own misunderstanding of deposition
That guy also had a history of mental issues and anxiety. He was away from home experiencing high stress environments, like a court room, and he was looking at another court appearance that day.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that maybe, just maybe, this is a coincidence instead of murder. He had already given the bulk of his testimony, so I really don’t see the motive here.
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.
Well, for one thing, the definition of “conspiracy” is “a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act”. So… you can’t have a one person conspiracy.
You don’t compare the stats to the population in its entirety. That’s like trying to calculate how dangerous it is for cyclists on the road by using the entire population. Most Americans don’t even own a bike. It is literally impossible for them to die riding their bike to work because they never ride a bike to work. They should not be included in an assessment of how dangerous it is/isn’t to be a daily bike commuter. Only people who ride bikes regularly should be included.
An example I use in another comment: you are far more likely to die falling to your death if you skydive once a year than the average American. If you suddenly died due to a parachute malfunction nobody would immediately start citing how statistically unusual it is for an American to die from falling to their death. You would be compared against the larger skydiving population and other risk factors would be assessed with that.
No, the whole point is you don’t unless you’re specifically asking “how likely is it for anyone” which is not applicable here. That’s like me trying to figure out how likely I am to die of diabetes within 24hrs when I don’t have diabetes. The answer is 0%, because I don’t have diabetes. So including me in a stat about likelihood of death when discussing diabetes is bad math unless you are trying to calculate the likelihood of it happening to literally anyone, which is not useful beyond answering that specific question.
You’re also denying the existence of more at-risk groups for things like suicide and illnesses. Different groups are more at risk than others. Imagine calculating how likely someone is to be an alcoholic without considering family history, their social and economic realities, etc. all of which increase or decrease the % chance they will develop alcoholism. Literally 0 experts will agree with your assessment if you leave those risk factors out.
You don’t include people who aren’t at risk of MRSA. You and I right now discussing this have a near-0% chance of catching it. So near that it functionally is 0%. We are not useful information. We should not be included in calculating the probability because he is more at risk by a large margin. We are not part of the data set.
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.
It means that there is a 99.998% chance that they were murdered, misdiagnosed or are not really dead.
There haven’t even been 1000 whistleblowers cases in recorded history, and the fact that the two deaths happened means the most likely cause by far was murder
We are talking in the context of with 12 whistleblowers on the same case. There are more cases with single wistleblowers, but also, the fewer whistleblowers per case, the lower the chance of one of them dying of suicide or MRSA.
For example, if there had only been 2 whistleblowers in total in this case, not 12, the chance of both dying from suicide and MRSA would be 0.00014 * 0.000062 =
0.00000000868 (0.000000868%).
And suicide rates go up drastically when people are overly stressed and think they have no future. Sort of like… having contributed to incredibly dangerous air travel and burning bridges with an entire industry.
Similarly, like I said, a lot of whistleblowers are ill to begin with. Because, again, it is throwing away your future in an industry. It is a lot easier to consider that when your future on this planet is measured in years or even months.
A LOT of documentaries/youtubes/whatever love to point out “the big evil company is ruining this man’s life when he is just trying to get his chemotherapy so that he can have a few more months with his family”. Which is indeed horrible (and why any good lawyer gets the testimony on record ASAP because people ARE pushed to suicide). But also kind of ignores that said company didn’t give them cancer… Unless we are having a repeat of the COVID conspiracy theories too.
Even if the dude that “killed himself” did do it to himself, he did so because he was harassed by a company for doing his job. Even in the non conspiracy version of the story, the corporation still acted in bad faith and should be held liable for it’s actions. Why is this the hill you want to die on?
There is plenty of evidence of foul play you smartass. They willingly risked lives over many years and are still currently flying many planes with defective unsafe parts. Going from that to assasination is not a big leap.
Multiple of the whistleblowers and their colleagues have also independently said that their workplace was directly and deliberately sabotaged in order to continue using defective parts.
Yes the last one doesnt really look like a typical assasination but it doesnt matter in the slightest if it was or not.
Well…the first dude did say something about Boeing killing whistleblowers and the bravery of others to step up in defiance of that.
So that whole line of thinking is conspiracy theory stuff with no real proof and it is being parroted here. Granted, usually the assassination stuff is usually tongue in cheek, but the top comment seems a bit crazy.
I agree that calling it “killing whistleblowers” is a bit too early, but for the point that the top comment was making, it doesnt actually matter.
Because his point was about the bravery of the other whistleblowers coming out and for that it doesnt matter if they actually got killed or not.
The 10 other whistleblowers are brave because there is a good chance that at least one of the whistleblowers was killed. They are still brave even if it turns out that the dead ones died of natural causes or suicide.
If the whistleblowers truly believe that the previous ones were assassinated, then they are brave for speaking out. They might be stupid, foolish, whatever, but they would be even more stupid if they didnt consider the possiblity of it being true.
Intent is what matters here not what is actually the case. This is obvious when it comes to law. For example if a judge decides that you truly believed that your life was in danger in a situation and that you had to act in self defense, you can usually not be sentenced for murder, even if it turns out that your life wasnt in danger after all.
Really this is a grammatical framing problem, but i think its totally fair to call these people “brave” either way, because even if their lives arent in danger, then at least their livelihood is.
1: I wholeheartedly believe being a whistleblower is a courageous and brave act. Full stop.
2: drawing conclusions as to why these people decided to speak up when they did without hearing it from them is nonsense.
3: assuming and repeating a John Gresham novel from news articles between corporations and their whistleblowers is not only buying into a conspiracy theory, but is also parroting it.
4: partaking in these conspiratorial shenanigans helps no one and isn’t something to be waved away as harmless - otherwise, what’s the difference here and qanon?
Yeah Kbin really jumped the shark. I gave up on it as well. Maybe one day Ernst will do literally everything that he said he would but… today is not that day, nor was yesterday, and I’m done waiting. In the meantime I’m wondering if I should block the entire instance due to all the spam that the complete lack of moderation (in some communities) is sending out to the entire Fediverse. Seriously, I am surprised it hasn’t been hit by waves of CP as many other instances have, in an attempt to swat it by getting the FBI involved. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new instance better!:-) Weird conversations such as is happening on this post aside, the Fediverse is kind of a neat place!
Also, you might check the list of which instances Kbin blocks by default, and choose to block them here (Settings -> Blocks, scroll way down to instances). e.g. lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net are some really common ones that people often block. Ofc you feel free to do you, and decide first what you want to see in your feed!:-) I just mention that bc after leaving the safe and protected Kbin.social I game close to leaving Lemmy too, until I blocked those two instances and it improved my experience on the Fediverse 95%.
I appreciate it! Luckily, I am somewhat well-versed in the fediverse af this point, even if if I get a little tripped up on linking sometimes lol but any and all advice about how to best navigate is always welcome.
I feel for Ernest! Has to be hard to keep up with all of this, his recent personal stuff aside.
For a user, you hit the @ sign then start typing, then you may have to wait a bit and it will make a list of every user that matches that partial string that you typed, and you have to select it from the list for it to convert into the actual link - e.g. @bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
For communities, I’m only recently learning this myself, it’s the ! sign and then the same process - e.g. !technology@lemmy.world.
You can hit the view source - icon to the right of up & down votes, left of reply - to see how it translates into, but that’s a LOT to try to remember, while the above is a lot easier process. The web browser UI isn’t really intuitive though - e.g. there are no buttons for either of those, and a bunch of other stuff doesn’t work all that well either when you click it, plus beware of clicking the formatting help button b/c it won’t open a new tab or anything - even though you can ONLY access it from within an EXISTING reply, nonetheless by default it will obliterate all of the text that you have typed so far and navigate to another page. None of the other options do that… but despite how there is basically zero distinction wrt its icon color or placement that might hint at that fact, that one behaves fundamentally differently from all the rest of them. So, if you are struggling, note that it may not be your fault: Lemmy is still in its infancy, and a lot of this isn’t as “polished” as it may one day become.
I still love it 100-fold better than Kbin’s interface. I did not think that I would, but I do.
Tbh, I feel less bad for Ernst the more time that goes by. At first I thought he was a GREAT dude, to take upon himself that whole concept of entirely re-envisioning the whole Lemmy code, and I definitely get that he was handed a bunch of lemons by life, but he also was the only one who decided what to do with them. e.g. he could have allowed a couple of other admins onto the kbin.social instance, even if he retained full & total control of the code side of things. I would not dream of trying to tell him what to do but… I also have the same rights, and since I no longer trust his word, him having broken it far too many times, I don’t think I will ever go back, even if everything that he hoped to do with Kbin ends up being done. He’s made his choices, and I do not respect them, though meanwhile everyone will move on regardless - which I do agree is really sad, especially after such an auspicious beginning, and along with everything I am saying I really truly do wish him the best, but… I am no longer willing to hold my breath anxiously awaiting that to happen anytime soon.
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”.Funny, just yesterday probably I was arguing with someone in another thread that was saying the people here don’t actually think Boeing had these whistleblowers killed, it was just making “implications and jokes.”
And here, very clearly, with a massive number of upvotes we have someone claiming that Boeing had them killed and that resulted in brave souls coming out afterward. lol
However, this also exposes another huge complaint I have with your typical lemmy-er (lemming? lemmite? what do you call a user of lemmy?): Almost no one reads the fucking article.
This isn’t about new whistleblowers coming out, but their lawyer claiming he is afraid that current whistle blowers will be “scared away.”
But, of course, what I’ve learned on reddit and even more so on lemmy is that the facts don’t matter, only the narrative.
You are describing the human species. Through its entire history.
Agreed. Although I will say… While people not reading the articles was extremely common on reddit… Sadly, I feel like Lemmy is even worse about it.
When I first started on reddit many years ago, while it was clear some people didn’t read the article, usually the top comment in the thread usually showed that they read the article, unless it was some kind joke. Over time it definitely got worse.
I was hoping when jumping to Lemmy that I would be able to recapture some of that magic.
Lemmy has a lot of good things going for it, but what I got in that regard is the top comment, with 100% upvotes, clearly not having read the article and spewing some unsubstantiated conspiratorial claims. It’s like being in r/conspiracy sometimes.
Yeah if you think we don’t do our due deligence, you should go to more right leaning social media, it’s all sound bites and knee jerk reactions.
Same as it ever was
Yes, varying people have different opinions on subjects. It is easy to think a comment with upvotes is the way the hivemind goes, but the hivemind has multiple factions.
I, personally, have no opinion on the matter. The dude was septic and had a stroke. While it seems unlikely that was murder, I guess it is possible if you have infinite resources to make it look natural. But that is one HELL of a coincidence to have two whistle-blowers die . … like. … pretty fucking insane. Watch these next ten all die and no one important bats an eye.
I mean If it was an organized thing then I’m not sure it’s so dumb
They can kill two people but if ten more people die it would look really bad on there part and would become undeniable
It already looks really bad
I don’t know seems like everyone I know is convinced that the first two murders were coincidence. What is keeping 10 more being that way?
The first was probably murder, the second just coincidence.
I was talking to someone the other day who was really bent out of shape over an extremely unpleasant customer. The kind of interaction that sticks with you for years.
I told my perspective on people. We tend to remember remarkable things - stuff that really stands out from the normal. The news media does the same thing. Normal, everyday stuff isn’t “newsworthy.”
So when an asshole customer stands out that much, it’s because it’s such a rare experience. People are mostly good, so the goodness doesn’t stand out.
Yeah, bad customers can ruin your day, but I remember doing customer service that one good customer with a nice smile can make your day good again. That’s why I always make an effort to be as nice as possible.
Yes but our current society vests power in the corporation doing the killing. It’s a problem as old as civilization, but one we still haven’t solved. The problem is that these institutions and the technology they wield has never been greater.
We need an impartial lawnmower. Something external to the species that comes in and cuts the biggest ones in half. And it needs to be incorruptible and powerful enough to do this.
Damn, I think I just invented god again.
I like to think that climate change is that lawnmower, we either learn to cooperate or die.
I invite to read history. Roman generals, European kings…
Anyone saying humans suck and are terrible is likely a terrible person themselves. Decent people tend to see the better aspect of humanity.
This is a leap. You can be a good person and also see that people as a whole can be both wonderful and absolutely terrible. This is a story about a mega corp murdering two whistleblowers, so far. In this case, the people involved in making this a headline suck and are terrible.
sadfsdfasfasf
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.
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.
I did do the math on it and the second guy only had a 1 in 3630 chance of dying of natural causes in that time window.
We do ourselves no favors by sounding like conspiracy nutjobs who are uninterested in facts. When they go low, we should retain the high road, imho.Edit: this… basically means tangentially what I had intended to say, so it is better off to be deleted, though I will leave it as strikethrough for the historical record (I really hate all those “deleted” messages, and don’t want to contribute one of my own too!).
Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number. Now, will attacking me bring those two murdered men back to life?
I apologize for my wording - I agree with you that I was out of line. There was some point I was trying to make, about the need to be cautious with our wording, but somehow I ended up doing the exact thing I was trying to warn about, didn’t I? Fwiw I don’t actually think that you suck at all - I was just really, Really, REALLY bad at expressing myself there.:-) Thank you for not returning the favor in like manner.
You good. Enjoy your weekend
Yes if you’re including the entire population (which is not how stats works) as his demographic is exponentially more at risk than many others (age, onset of pneumonia, etc)
https://lemmy.world/comment/9809397
I admit I am not a stats guy. Please tell me what I did wrong in my math. Totally open to being corrected here.
You don’t just take the entire population and calculate the odds that they will contract and/or die of something. For instance, I could trivialize bike injuries/deaths in the US because countless people do not commute regularly on their bikes. Hell tens of millions don’t even have one and haven’t ridden a bike since they were children. The stat isn’t super useful unless we are discussing how many regular cyclists get hurt. Otherwise countless non-cyclists dilute the useful information - if they don’t ride bikes, they aren’t at risk at all. And that’s not even taking into account locale. Different population densities,topographies, etc. have different risks. But we can set that aside for now as I think you likely get what I’m driving at there.
MRSA affects more specific demographics and conditions. Somebody who is older who contracts pneumonia and enters a hospital is far more likely than the average population to contract it - and it has a 10-20% lethality which is extremely high - so their risk has to be assessed in that context.
If we only compared it against the general population, then hospitals would simply go “well in the grand scheme of things not many people die of MRSA.“ When what they’re (correctly) saying is “if you are elderly and have pneumonia we need to really watch out for MRSA.” Because that is a real risk.
At 45 he’s not elderly but he’s within the range we see with MRSA unfortunately and pneumonia is a huge trigger for it (compromised immune system open to secondary infection). It’s incredibly resistant to antibiotics/cleaning supplies and is a real killer. Because hospitals clean so much it’s actually more likely to happen there than in “the real world“ because it gets selected out.
So he isn’t super young (least contributing factor), he has pneumonia (big contributing factor), and is in a hospital (where it almost exclusively occurs). His odds were higher than that of the general population the same way if you go skydiving you have a higher chance of dying from falling to your death than the average population.
Ok can you give me an actual number?
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.
It sounds like neither of us know the answer to that, so I choose not to comment on that matter.
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.
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.
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.
Dude, this thread is hopeless.
There can be far more done than just an autopsy in the second case. Is there a register who has entered and left the building? Is there camera footage showing anyone accessing the room that had no business being there? Is there anything unusual in the nurses schedules? Were all procedures followed according to the rules, especially sanitary rules?
These are all things that should be investigated. If they show no signs of irregularities then the case can be closed. If there is irregularities, then these need to be investigated further, and then the question of motive comes into play, where there is one party with a very strong motive to silence the guy.
Again, a dozen whistleblowers now, and 2 died fairly quickly after coming out.
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There’s 2 kinds of evidence.
The guy saying he won’t kill himself requires inferring that he’s being truthful when he said it and that he didn’t change his mind. It’s not non-evidence, it does point to suicide being less likely. But it’s far from conclusive. If there’s no sign of entering the vehicle or that a struggle occurred, then I’d argue that far outweighs his prior statement.
That’s also a common misunderstanding, at least regarding the first (I’m not as familiar with the second). I’m a bit unclear on the details of the deposition - which side wanted it and was asking the questions, etc. (detailed here) but whatever the case, it was Boeing that demanded he come back for one more day. So if Boeing wanted him to not testify that day, they’d just send him home as originally planned. The only reason they’d do it then was to silence him generally…but doing it in a way that draws so much suspicion to them seems like an implausibly bad decision. Then again, it is Boeing. (Note that this is also circumstantial evidence, and requires assuming that Boeing isn’t so dumb as to kill a witness in the middle of their own deposition, which may not be warranted).
Edit: corrected my own misunderstanding of deposition
Its also inferring his friend is being truthful when he said that’s what the guy said.
Hey.
Yeah?
See this gun?
I do.
Kill yourself with it or I will kill everyone in your family. Here is a list of their names and addresses.
What if I kill you instead?
Guys who sent me will send someone else.
That guy also had a history of mental issues and anxiety. He was away from home experiencing high stress environments, like a court room, and he was looking at another court appearance that day.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that maybe, just maybe, this is a coincidence instead of murder. He had already given the bulk of his testimony, so I really don’t see the motive here.
Testimony is thrown out because he was obviously mentally unstable
Is that what happened…?
Will
Probably would have happened if it was going to.
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.
How is your take also not a conspiracy theory? You just pinned it on the little guy instead of a megacorp
Well, for one thing, the definition of “conspiracy” is “a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act”. So… you can’t have a one person conspiracy.
Ah yes, technicalities, the best of defenses
I mean, ask a stupid question…
I was trying to match OP’s and your IQ level
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.
You don’t compare the stats to the population in its entirety. That’s like trying to calculate how dangerous it is for cyclists on the road by using the entire population. Most Americans don’t even own a bike. It is literally impossible for them to die riding their bike to work because they never ride a bike to work. They should not be included in an assessment of how dangerous it is/isn’t to be a daily bike commuter. Only people who ride bikes regularly should be included.
An example I use in another comment: you are far more likely to die falling to your death if you skydive once a year than the average American. If you suddenly died due to a parachute malfunction nobody would immediately start citing how statistically unusual it is for an American to die from falling to their death. You would be compared against the larger skydiving population and other risk factors would be assessed with that.
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.
No, the whole point is you don’t unless you’re specifically asking “how likely is it for anyone” which is not applicable here. That’s like me trying to figure out how likely I am to die of diabetes within 24hrs when I don’t have diabetes. The answer is 0%, because I don’t have diabetes. So including me in a stat about likelihood of death when discussing diabetes is bad math unless you are trying to calculate the likelihood of it happening to literally anyone, which is not useful beyond answering that specific question.
You’re also denying the existence of more at-risk groups for things like suicide and illnesses. Different groups are more at risk than others. Imagine calculating how likely someone is to be an alcoholic without considering family history, their social and economic realities, etc. all of which increase or decrease the % chance they will develop alcoholism. Literally 0 experts will agree with your assessment if you leave those risk factors out.
You don’t include people who aren’t at risk of MRSA. You and I right now discussing this have a near-0% chance of catching it. So near that it functionally is 0%. We are not useful information. We should not be included in calculating the probability because he is more at risk by a large margin. We are not part of the data set.
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.
Better than 1 in a thousand, makes it seem less unlikely.
It means that there is a 99.998% chance that they were murdered, misdiagnosed or are not really dead.
There haven’t even been 1000 whistleblowers cases in recorded history, and the fact that the two deaths happened means the most likely cause by far was murder
The SEC had 12k. Whistle blower tips in 2022 alone, so I’m going to say that less then 1000 cases in recorded history is a lie.
We are talking in the context of with 12 whistleblowers on the same case. There are more cases with single wistleblowers, but also, the fewer whistleblowers per case, the lower the chance of one of them dying of suicide or MRSA.
For example, if there had only been 2 whistleblowers in total in this case, not 12, the chance of both dying from suicide and MRSA would be 0.00014 * 0.000062 = 0.00000000868 (0.000000868%).
And suicide rates go up drastically when people are overly stressed and think they have no future. Sort of like… having contributed to incredibly dangerous air travel and burning bridges with an entire industry.
Similarly, like I said, a lot of whistleblowers are ill to begin with. Because, again, it is throwing away your future in an industry. It is a lot easier to consider that when your future on this planet is measured in years or even months.
A LOT of documentaries/youtubes/whatever love to point out “the big evil company is ruining this man’s life when he is just trying to get his chemotherapy so that he can have a few more months with his family”. Which is indeed horrible (and why any good lawyer gets the testimony on record ASAP because people ARE pushed to suicide). But also kind of ignores that said company didn’t give them cancer… Unless we are having a repeat of the COVID conspiracy theories too.
Even if the dude that “killed himself” did do it to himself, he did so because he was harassed by a company for doing his job. Even in the non conspiracy version of the story, the corporation still acted in bad faith and should be held liable for it’s actions. Why is this the hill you want to die on?
OK, but that’s a pretty big difference from hiring a hitman to explicitly murder him.
Yes, it is different.
No one is saying Boeing execs shouldn’t be prosecuted.
There is plenty of evidence of foul play you smartass. They willingly risked lives over many years and are still currently flying many planes with defective unsafe parts. Going from that to assasination is not a big leap.
Multiple of the whistleblowers and their colleagues have also independently said that their workplace was directly and deliberately sabotaged in order to continue using defective parts.
Yes the last one doesnt really look like a typical assasination but it doesnt matter in the slightest if it was or not.
Well…the first dude did say something about Boeing killing whistleblowers and the bravery of others to step up in defiance of that.
So that whole line of thinking is conspiracy theory stuff with no real proof and it is being parroted here. Granted, usually the assassination stuff is usually tongue in cheek, but the top comment seems a bit crazy.
I agree that calling it “killing whistleblowers” is a bit too early, but for the point that the top comment was making, it doesnt actually matter. Because his point was about the bravery of the other whistleblowers coming out and for that it doesnt matter if they actually got killed or not.
The 10 other whistleblowers are brave because there is a good chance that at least one of the whistleblowers was killed. They are still brave even if it turns out that the dead ones died of natural causes or suicide.
If the “bravery” and admiration comes against the idea of assassination, then it completely matters. Idk why you’re hand waving the nonsense here
If the whistleblowers truly believe that the previous ones were assassinated, then they are brave for speaking out. They might be stupid, foolish, whatever, but they would be even more stupid if they didnt consider the possiblity of it being true.
Intent is what matters here not what is actually the case. This is obvious when it comes to law. For example if a judge decides that you truly believed that your life was in danger in a situation and that you had to act in self defense, you can usually not be sentenced for murder, even if it turns out that your life wasnt in danger after all.
Really this is a grammatical framing problem, but i think its totally fair to call these people “brave” either way, because even if their lives arent in danger, then at least their livelihood is.
1: I wholeheartedly believe being a whistleblower is a courageous and brave act. Full stop.
2: drawing conclusions as to why these people decided to speak up when they did without hearing it from them is nonsense.
3: assuming and repeating a John Gresham novel from news articles between corporations and their whistleblowers is not only buying into a conspiracy theory, but is also parroting it.
4: partaking in these conspiratorial shenanigans helps no one and isn’t something to be waved away as harmless - otherwise, what’s the difference here and qanon?
2 people dying is kind of fishy.
Bolexforpoop back wih pigshit again. The reason i don’t block you is your neverending entertainment value. Keep posting king.
Three-day old account, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had another one that was banned.
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Yeah Kbin really jumped the shark. I gave up on it as well. Maybe one day Ernst will do literally everything that he said he would but… today is not that day, nor was yesterday, and I’m done waiting. In the meantime I’m wondering if I should block the entire instance due to all the spam that the complete lack of moderation (in some communities) is sending out to the entire Fediverse. Seriously, I am surprised it hasn’t been hit by waves of CP as many other instances have, in an attempt to swat it by getting the FBI involved. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new instance better!:-) Weird conversations such as is happening on this post aside, the Fediverse is kind of a neat place!
Also, you might check the list of which instances Kbin blocks by default, and choose to block them here (Settings -> Blocks, scroll way down to instances). e.g. lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net are some really common ones that people often block. Ofc you feel free to do you, and decide first what you want to see in your feed!:-) I just mention that bc after leaving the safe and protected Kbin.social I game close to leaving Lemmy too, until I blocked those two instances and it improved my experience on the Fediverse 95%.
I appreciate it! Luckily, I am somewhat well-versed in the fediverse af this point, even if if I get a little tripped up on linking sometimes lol but any and all advice about how to best navigate is always welcome.
I feel for Ernest! Has to be hard to keep up with all of this, his recent personal stuff aside.
Yeah… linking was hard for me to figure out.
For a user, you hit the @ sign then start typing, then you may have to wait a bit and it will make a list of every user that matches that partial string that you typed, and you have to select it from the list for it to convert into the actual link - e.g. @bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
For communities, I’m only recently learning this myself, it’s the ! sign and then the same process - e.g. !technology@lemmy.world.
You can hit the view source - icon to the right of up & down votes, left of reply - to see how it translates into, but that’s a LOT to try to remember, while the above is a lot easier process. The web browser UI isn’t really intuitive though - e.g. there are no buttons for either of those, and a bunch of other stuff doesn’t work all that well either when you click it, plus beware of clicking the formatting help button b/c it won’t open a new tab or anything - even though you can ONLY access it from within an EXISTING reply, nonetheless by default it will obliterate all of the text that you have typed so far and navigate to another page. None of the other options do that… but despite how there is basically zero distinction wrt its icon color or placement that might hint at that fact, that one behaves fundamentally differently from all the rest of them. So, if you are struggling, note that it may not be your fault: Lemmy is still in its infancy, and a lot of this isn’t as “polished” as it may one day become.
I still love it 100-fold better than Kbin’s interface. I did not think that I would, but I do.
Tbh, I feel less bad for Ernst the more time that goes by. At first I thought he was a GREAT dude, to take upon himself that whole concept of entirely re-envisioning the whole Lemmy code, and I definitely get that he was handed a bunch of lemons by life, but he also was the only one who decided what to do with them. e.g. he could have allowed a couple of other admins onto the kbin.social instance, even if he retained full & total control of the code side of things. I would not dream of trying to tell him what to do but… I also have the same rights, and since I no longer trust his word, him having broken it far too many times, I don’t think I will ever go back, even if everything that he hoped to do with Kbin ends up being done. He’s made his choices, and I do not respect them, though meanwhile everyone will move on regardless - which I do agree is really sad, especially after such an auspicious beginning, and along with everything I am saying I really truly do wish him the best, but… I am no longer willing to hold my breath anxiously awaiting that to happen anytime soon.
I was not expecting such a thorough response, thank you! This actually does help clear some things up.
But this whole thread is about assuming the worst based on half info, why would they stop when you’re saying something they don’t like?
It’s very naive to think that a weapons dealer who also kills it’s commercial airline passengers for profit isn’t also killing whistleblowers.
Nice try Boeing