- person clearly had meticulously planned the execution of the hit and exfiltration. Even leaving red herrings on his way out of the city (backpack full of Monopoly money). Yet clumsily keeps _all_ of the evidence that would implicate himself in this murder. Not to mention he is wandering about in public while a multi-state manhunt is underway with the full weight of alphabet soup agencies, and state and local LEOs? To me, this suggests it was part of his plan to get caught. There was no escape to a non-extradition country. The “shaking” mentioned while talking with police could just be a massive surge of adrenaline as he sees his plan unfold before his eyes. Then use the live streamed and televised court to spread his message. Then live out the rest of his life as a political figure as the media continue to analyze this persons life and motivations. Just like Ted.
- Or the internet, media really over-estimated this persons competence. It was really just dumb luck that he even escaped NYC. At that point, he was just improvising after leaving NYC. His arrogance to keep the evidence as some sick mementos or trophies ultimately did him in. Likely try to plead insanity with the manifesto. Probably fail to do so, then eventually get convicted on all charges and end up in a supermax penitentiary for life.
I'll confirm it for you right now. For me it's not just the back, it's areas along the entire spine. I've had spinal cord compression on my thoracic spine since late 2017 and nobody will touch it. My lumbar spine has many herniations and "schmorl's nodes" (where it's chipping away at the actual vertebrae) in addition to clamping my nerve roots shut. I had emergency surgery in my neck in early 2018. Prior to the thoracic spine injury, I was in the best shape of my life; very muscular and healthy with a 6-pack like you see in Luigi's pictures.
It's been an absolute miserable experience for the last 8 years. Being gaslighted by doctors before and after my surgery didn't help. Insurance tried to deny my emergency surgery at first despite the fact I lost all sensation from the neck down almost overnight. When you're dealing with trauma and the system works against you, very dark thoughts start to form. I'm not going to say I condone what Luigi did, but if you think people go through these events and don't think those thoughts on many occasions, you're so very wrong. There's a HUGE range of emotions that comes with it all. Suicide was definitely one of them for a long time as well. I have a wife and kids though and do not wish to burden them further by adding to the list of problems. They're the only things that's kept me going strong this whole time.
What sort of injections are you referring to? Corticosteroid injections can sometimes be helpful in the short term but clinical practice guidelines discourage prolonged use due to the risk of bone damage and other severe side effects. So insurers aren't necessarily wrong to deny payment for those.
Overall, the options for severe chronic pain are: heavy painkillers, physical therapy, wait-and-see (hope they improve) and if not ... dignified exit.
If they improve it takes years. And painkillers are ABSOLUTELY a must during that time but the innocent monsters (largely the rest of the population that is) will cry out "opioid addiction!!!", cut them off and sadistically (in their mind, gently) advise to get over it.
I have no words how much I despise this world. It's all fine and dandy until you lose your health, afterwards you really see it for how it is.
As I get older, I understand this phrase more and more.
Same here, except I’ve had it since ~2000 (mid-teenager). Anytime a suggested treatment makes it to insurance, they deny it because “it’s extremely uncommon for back problems of someone your age to be in the thoracic spine.” They’ll gladly pay for unnecessary surgeries on the lumbar, but refuse even many diagnostic attempts in the thoracic area.
I haven’t gotten all the details, but something like this makes sense. It was a personal vendetta from a person out of desperation/frustration.
I guess as more details come out we will know
I dont think the two are equivalent
Both can be ended via suicide, if the inmate so chooses.
If there somehow end up being Pennsylvania or federal charges against him in connection with the murder, those criminal law systems still have the death penalty.
He does currently face some Pennsylvania charges as well, such as firearms charges in connection with the encounter where he was arrested, but none of those are severe enough to warrant a death sentence.
The difference between those two and a non-imprisoned life is... significant.
I'm reminded of the trial of John Brown. For those who aren't history buffs, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA in October 1859, hoping to steal weapons to arm the slaves and fuel a slave revolt. He was caught and executed in December 1859. The country collapsed into civil war 17 months later, at Lincoln's inauguration. Historians wryly note that John Brown was executed for doing, on a small scale, the same thing that Lincoln did on a large scale 2 years later.
which seems pretty far-fetched to me.
But poster ablation earlier spoke of the:
"toxic stew of stupidity and sub-4chan conspiracy theorising." on ZeroHedge."
Is HN immune to what happened to Zerohedge? Some of the posts here are pretty speculative, to put it mildly.
Jurors are screened for bias, likely questions from the prosecutors will include, "Have you ever been denied a medical insurance claim?" Those who answer yes will definitely not make the jury. Lots of people can answer with a "no" quite truthfully, myself included.
(Note also that I am not making a comment on whether or not I approve of how juries are selected, this is simply how it works.)
That’s not a sufficient basis for a dismissal for cause, most people who have ever had insurance would answer “Yes” to that question, and prosecutors don’t have an infinite number of peremptory challenges.
So, they probably won’t dismiss on the basis of that answer alone, but do some followup if the answer is “Yes”.
You're right there are lots of people who can answer "no". However, it's also possible that such a cohort is not a true jury of peers, and remember that juries skew older.
It's possible that screening everyone out who answers "yes" would not be allowed by the judge for this reason. Then, the prosecution would only have a small number of "no reason" exclusions.
People who have never personally been insured would answer “no” truthfully, people who have been insured but only consumed in-network, fairly routine services might be able to answer “No” truthfully (though hiccups even with that leading to initial denials are not uncommon), and people under 26 who have only been on their parents insurance and have been shielded from the details of insurance interactions would be able to answer “No” often without intentional misrepresentation.
> However, it’s also possible that such a cohort is not a true jury of peers,
“Jury of peers” is a line from Magna Carta referring to barons’ right to have their guilt or innocence determined by other barons and does not appear in the US Constitution. The limitation on excluding jurors in the US system is that the unlimited number of exclusions for cause that attorneys for either side may request are determined by the judge on the basis of whether the potential juror has sufficient evidence of bias that would make them incapable of rendering a fair verdict, and other exclusions (peremptory challenges) are sharply limited in number, not some assessment of whether the net result is “a true jury of peers”.
My wife's eye exam was scheduled a day early. Denied, though I'm not that annoyed over $250.
Originally I said I wasn't going on a shooting spree over it and edited it. Maybe I should have left it after all.
In the US, it will be very difficult to find people who can say no to that.
One of the more sympathetic views towards the murderer is that there was no legal avenue to pursue the CEO for mass fraud under which the plaintiffs would get a fair shake. Vigilantism is more welcome by the public when it appears to be the only recourse.
What prevents the juror answering "no", and then acting precisely on this belief?
Just for curiosities sake, who did you think would win the latest US presidential election?
I feel like many (most?) people on the internet are kind of disconnected from people's everyday life outside of the internet. I'm guessing that most of the average folks (people outside the internet zeitgeist) never even heard about this assassination, even less cares about the assassin going free if they did.
I was at a party over the weekend. I asked a room of 30 people what they thought of the assassin and the overwhelming consensus was hero, they wouldn't say anything if they saw him, and if they were on the jury they would acquit. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a replay of OJ Simpson where one of the jurors gave OJ a power fist as he walked out for the verdict. It only takes 1 person to get onto the jury and acquit. Americans love a robin hood.
I'm guessing that makes it pretty clear that it wasn't really a mixed of "real Americans" as almost nothing is so black & white, especially if you compare people who live very different lives.
But, I could be wrong, it has happened before and it's bound to happen again at some point :)
I'd say the HN public is the bubble there. Lot of aspiring CEO who take the "don't care with rules if you can get away with it" message to heart so they feel like they have more in common with the victim than with the perpetrator of this murder. While I would not be surprised if it is the reverse for 90% of the USA population.
So? You'd be surprised by what many of them think about insurance companies CEOs.
Are insurance companies more liked among internet users or less liked among internet users (than the population at large)? I presume that internet users tend to be wealthier (due to more free/leisure time, better browsing technology) and less angry with their insurance than non-users, but could be wrong.
By having a filtering process before the jury is empanelled to identify that.
Does a hung jury not just lead to a retrial?
A hung jury leads to a mistrial. After a mistrial, the prosecution has the option of trying the case again, but it gets harder (you’ve got more time from the events, a more-tainted jury pool, etc.)
Also, if there are multiple charges, and the jury reaches a not guilty verdict on any charges, that may impact the ability to refile other charges, or make it harder to try them if they can be refiled, because any fact that the jury necessarily rejected in an acquittal is finally decided by that acquittal.
But god forbid it's also used to treat sick people! Or prisoners.
It should have happened without death, is all.
If he just shot someone randomly in a poorer neighbourhood he likely would still be free.
I redact my previous comment but leave it for posterity.
(Even then: being a cop or the President helps...)
For almost all other crimes, no, probably not.
Even for murder, it's not entirely true; https://nypost.com/2024/12/05/us-news/teen-killed-another-wo... happened on the same day, but certainly didn't see the level of police resources involved in finding the killer. Teams of cops with drones weren't searching large swathes of NYC for those perps.
It’s the obvious answer as to why he still had the gun on him.
https://archive.is/2024.12.09-230659/https://breloomlegacy.s...
I'm in a similar situation with a family member and we are spending around 4-5k/month in a variety of non-allopathic strategies for this family member's health care. However, the family patriarch has drawn the line where his financial support is in providing housing, so the 4-5k is picked up by other family members.
Its homeopathy, NOT healthcare.
Perhaps what we are doing is still considered allopathic (most strategies are informed with research a la pubmed), with an osteopathic approach (whole body).
The difference here is that we’re able to eschew traditional means (dr appointment, lab test, drug rx feedback loop) of engaging with the medical system, while engaging with non-traditional health related businesses for our own care.
For example, we’re able to validate whether genetic disorders are at play by having sequenced full DNA and matching them against known genetic mutations.
We will order our own blood tests and pay out of pocket to quest, to drive decision making. Same thing a regular doctor would do, but in a far more expedited timeline. It’s a 1-2 day process test a vit D levels to determine and adjust dosing. An average doctor might be 3 weeks out for a 15 minute appointment to write that vit D lab script, then another week out from reviewing and writing the Rx for D.
4-5k a month is the cost of what someone with profound chronic illness ends up paying if they want to do their own R&D, deal with things on their own, in a manner that ensures timeliness and the best care possible. It’s a myth that access to the brightest minds (a la an institution like Mayo Clinic equals the best care, btw)
The money is merely the average in which to access the latest tests, as quickly as possible, medical equipment normally inaccessible to the general public and test and treatment options an engaged and highly trained MD that practices something such as precision medicine might suggest at the height of their careers’ charging power.
It also helps that the patriarch is a retired MD and can let us engage with the system out of band by writing scripts for medications that would be unavailable to the average public.
When lives and suffering are on the line, and we’re in these highly compensated roles, 4-5k/month is a privilege to spend for loved ones. Much of it may be lit on fire, so to speak, in personal r&d efforts, but each of them yields a win that gets us closer to a healthy baseline.
That would mean, there is a 50% chance that in general all the evidence has a 50% chance of being fake. And this is likely a bit of a exxageration.
No, not all evidence - only the one needed for the Parallel Construction.
The word equally possible implies equal chances for me. Otherwise it is equally possible, that the evidence was in fact planted by aliens.
Maybe I have too low expectation about USA interface between law enforcement and judiciary, but here in Poland there were many high-profile cases of misconduct of public prosecutors that colluded with the police. The only "proven" cases were about purposefuly destroying evidence: breaking CDs that held incriminating recordings, wiping weapons to remove fingerprints, agreeing to single version of testimony etc. They used procedural quirks to prevent defence from challenging those "mishaps" (like in one high-profile case with broken CD, they argued defence-held copy cannot be submitted, because of continuous custody requirements). Cases with planted evidence were always he-said-she-said, because when police writes a search report where they said you had something, then you have no way to challenge that.
May I add, fraud around those arrest/search reports (however they're called it English) is rampant. It starts with simple things, like notifying the subject about right to attorney. They just tick a box that you declined to summon attorney, and you have no way to challenge that, other than refusing to sign the paper, act of which carries no value.
I’m sure there’s other like her who will work on high profile cases to gain recognition.
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/judy_clarke_has_...
> Clarke would probably not want anyone to feel indebted to her. In fact, after the Smith case, she returned the $82,944 fee the state paid her, saying that other indigent defendants could use it more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kardashian
> Simpson was the best man at Kardashian and Kris Houghton's wedding in 1978.
> Following the June 12, 1994, murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson stayed in Kardashian's house to avoid the media. Kardashian was the man seen carrying Simpson's garment bag the day that Simpson flew back from Chicago. Prosecutors speculated that the bag may have contained Simpson's bloody clothes or the murder weapon.
> As one of Simpson's lawyers and a member of the defense "Dream Team", Kardashian could not be compelled or subpoenaed to testify against Simpson in the case, which included Simpson's past history and behavior with his ex-wife Nicole, and as to the contents of Simpson's garment bag.
Founding Movie Tunes?
Ever since he got "caught" (if you can call someone literally telling the police where he is "the police catching him"), all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" (i.e. attempting to demonstrate that a bullet was not only fired from a given type of gun but a specific singular gun of that type) and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him. They might actually be lucky and produce matches in this case as they have the actual suspect and murder weapon (assuming this wasn't an extremely unlikely 5D chess move of using a body double fall guy and/or different gun) but both of these types of evidence are extremely unreliable and rarely help actually finding the suspect even if they make for good television when they work. As I understand it the police even walked back on the mayor's initial claim about "having a name" to "having a list of names" - not to mention that you don't call in the FBI when you already have good leads yourself (if only for optics/political reasons).
He seems to have been mentally unstable for a while before engaging in this killing and the fact he wrote a manifesto strongly suggests he had an intention of being caught or at least considered it highly likely. The monopoly money bag wasn't necessarily a "red herring" as everyone I heard talk about it interpreted it as intending to send a message, which seems to agree with the apparent contents of his manifesto (based on what news reports have cited from it). The water bottle the police now wants to use for DNA evidence may have been deliberately left there for this purpose, too.
Based on what I've heard of his manifesto, he may have intended to kill other people too but have realized the difficulty involved given that his very public first killing likely spooked the other people on his list. I think it's more likely he didn't fully plan out an entire sequence of killings or didn't account for these complications and essentially gave up, settling on being caught sooner rather than later. People generally don't write manifestos when they don't also want to take credit for their actions.
We just make enough sense to mostly get by in the world.
That said, apparently his manifesto is fairly short and honestly sounds more like a confession than an actual political manifesto.
My point is more that usually when you hear about a killer having a manifesto you expect a lenghty diatribe about what they think is wrong with society and why they think what they did helps fix it - whether it's early 20th century "propaganda of the deed" anarchists, late 20th century "fall of the West" primitivists or early 21st century "race war" white supremacists and "new crusade" Christian nationalists. Of course for e.g. Islamist terrorists you don't even need a manifesto because everyone knows the cliff notes version already (Western imperialism, Islamic caliphate, blasphemy, etc). Instead this guy seems to have largely been upset with privatized healthcare, which is a common sentiment but rarely enough to motivate someone to pull off such an elaborate stunt.
That his manifesto is pretty rushed and incomplete does support the idea that he's more mentally unstable than genuinely "politically radicalized" though. The Christchurch shooter's manifesto for example was fairly incoherent and seemed more like an elaborate trolling attempt than a sophisticated political tract but clearly some effort went into it. Luigi's almost feels like a half-hearted homework assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if he quickly wrote it after the killing on a whim and didn't give it much thought before, which again would fit with my impression that he really focused on the first killing and didn't plan out much beyond that. As someone struggling with ADHD and autistic hyperfixation (not saying either of those apply to him), I can relate.
I don't know about your country, but in my country if you look like the person shown on CCTV committing a crime, you're wearing the same jacket, you're carrying the same illegal gun, and you're carrying a handwritten manifesto justifying the crime?
That's enough evidence for a normal jury of normal people to convict. The cops don't really need to add any DNA or CSI woo, juries are capable of exercising common sense.
Only way there's reasonable doubt here is if the guy's carrying the first place trophy for the CEO shooter lookalike contest.
It's pretty humiliating if you have a big militarized police force and can't catch a guy who killed a big important CEO in public and then went on wearing the murder suit in public until a random McDonald's guy calls you up and literally tells you where to find him, in public.
Where is that shit now for a guy they have VIDEOS of?
Remember when osama bin Laden was staying a relatives house and not in a secret underground cave network?
This CSI/Navy seal messaging is compliance propaganda.
Remember when the US spy agencies prevented a credible terrorist plot by accidentally catching a guy in the Middle East carrying a thumb drive with terrorist plans on it?
Surveillance exists to maintain control, it can't help establish it. Dragnet surveillance exists to reconstruct events, not to prevent them. And most importantly, it all exists to suppress, not to protect. It's about dominance, not security.
Conference probably had a hotel block they were booking and a link to book so you know which hotel to camp.
Not rocket science at all, just basic OSint
Waiting 15min instead of 1hr 15min was probably luck though.
In this case it was Hilton. And if the CEO stayed at Hilton he had no reason to be on the street outside the hotel where the killer was waiting for him. Somehow the shooter knew that the target is not staying at the Hilton and will be walking to the front entrance. BTW, the normal practice for high profile individuals to arrive in a car to a service entrance hidden from the public.
I’d feel more confident if he’d staked the route out for multiple days or if there was a plausible backup plan like breaking in to the CEO’s hotel or the conference.
For all we know he made 15 attempts before this.
They weren't engraved. It was just Sharpie. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/united-healthcare-ceo-brian-tho... "A source briefed on the investigation said each word was meticulously written, not etched, onto the casings in Sharpie."
> 100% sure the guy is going to be there.
One can be 100% sure the guy is gonna at least be at the conference, and humans tend to be predictable. He was also fairly likely to be at the venue the day before getting prepared.
A tremendous amount of time and effort is spent with it all riding on a few, hopefully, well placed assumptions. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Usually your acquaintances only hear about the times the hunt works out. Same with this. We only hear about it, because it worked out for the hunter
Because someone paid that much money stays at a fancier place, like one of the Conrads or Waldorf Astorias. Hilton's a mid-level brand.
Or, you follow him from the conference center the day before.
But they may well have arranged other, small meetings with people also attending the same annual meeting. It's then convenient to have them all in the same hotel.
He needed a Neilsen device or piston in the suppressor to assist with cycling on the action, which he didn't have.
He's not surprised that he has to rack the slide after every shot, he knows that it most likely will not cycle and he'll have to work it manually and he reaches immediately to do it.
edit: i'll speculate and say the suppressor still worked after the shooting because he still had it on him. if it was melted or broken, he may have been more apt to toss it.
I mean he’s clearly a bright individual, Ivy League and comp sci major and all so did he study YouTube videos or something?
It is a bit of psychological blindness where we convince ourselves that random murders aren't as easy as they really are. The truth is that almost anyone -- including people with lots of security theater -- can be nullified by random people. This is quadruply true in the era of drones.
Most normal people just have a healthy self preservation instinct, so aren't willing to accept those consequences.
As tech advances over time, this will all only become even more true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
547 so far this year. If we had equal justice for all in this country, this CEO shooting would have barely made local news, maybe.
Don't lie at us with statistics like that. The bulk of those so called "mass shootings", normal crimes gone off the rails and other things that are nowhere near what people think when you use the words "mass shooting", which is almost certainly the slight of hand you're going for.
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition. While what you say and like you reference is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader to portray it as you did. The typical mass shooting on that list consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime (usually a crime for profit gone off the rails or the drug industry DIYing dispute resolution) wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
Pretty much every mass shooting by the colloquial definition makes the national news. I am unaware of any one that has not.
Now that sounds like obvious selection bias. Also, the Wikipedia article says "specifically for the purposes of this article, a total of four or more victims". But the point about the categorization is well taken. As the article says: "Many incidents involving organized crime and gang violence are included."
“ A man was killed and three women were injured when they fired upon in a vehicle on eastbound Roosevelt Road near Cicero Avenue in Cicero. The victims fled north onto Cicero Avenue into Chicago where they crashed, leading to three others being injured in the crash.[16]”
^ Who would call this a mass shooting?
And in a society that strongly valued equality before the law, they wouldn’t dare treat the two cases so differently. Thus we can see that we don’t live in such a society.
How would "equality before the law" as you described even work? If some celebrity got killed and people wanted to contribute their resources into finding their killer, is that suddenly bad now? If my son got killed and I'm trying to find his killer rather than doing the Right Thing™ by devoting my time equally among all unsolved murder cases, am I a bad person?
Where? If you go by reddit, there's a "huge number of people" who want to see society collapse in a socialist revolution, but that's clearly not representative of the overall population. Even the disparity between the support for kamala vs at the polls was stark.
Justice is not defined by the law, but by personal values. The prosecutor in this case is going to be obsessive in ensuring that none of the jurors understand their legal right to jury nullification, because if they do - this guy stands a very high chance of a mistrial - if not outright acquittal.
that's... not the same thing being argued a few comments up? ie.
"Keep in mind, for this case in specific, a huge number of people did not want it solved"
I don't think it's controversial that the CEO isn't well liked, or that some (most?) people thought his death was a net good, but that's not the same as actively wanting the murder to not be solved.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/10/15/swedens-homici...
In reality, the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other. Whether it be with a legally-purchased gun, an illegally-purchased gun, a homemade gun, a knife, a homemade shank, a baseball bat, a vehicle.
>the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other
Both of these things can be true. You can have a rampant gang violence problem, and also a rampant school shooting problem. The fact that the gang problem is worse doesn't make the school shooting problem okay, and to use this to argue against gun control is... odd.
Banning a right is the worst bandaid "fix" possible, on top of what is a much more fundamental problem that can't be solved by merely stopping one of its symptoms. Our people are sick in multiple ways. Let's fix that.
Most discussion and statistics about gun violence intentionally obfuscates these facts. We could speculate about the motivations why, but it is largely irrelevant.
Since I disagree, I will offer my own statistic: the leading cause of death in the United States among children and adolescents is gunshot wound.
I think that the risk is highly concentrated on a subset of people, an individuals can take simple actions to remove themselves from that subset.
Examples would be if you steer clear of gangs, drugs, and abusive partners, your risk is drastically lower than the national average. The same is true for your kids, especially if you don't keep guns in your house.
Now, I still think it's a problem that other Americans are dying from gun violence, even if I don't think I am personally at much risk. I will admit that this does reduce the sense of urgency I feel, and I suspect that this is why the numbers are obfuscated.
The groups that want to reduce gun violence rightly understand that personal fear is a greater motivator then general concern for the well-being of others, so the narrative exaggerates the former and not the letter. This is why you get lone suicide grouped with home invasion for gun violence statistics. It is why you get 2 gang members shot in a drug deal gone bad classified with school massacres as mass shootings.
Of the numbers I've seen, in total gun related dealths are evenly split between suicide and homicide.
Of the homicides, ~10-50% are gang related (depending on source) and ~50% are drug-related (including overlap with gang).
F.ex. intimate partner violence being another major homicide category.
I've seen numbers on the order of 10% for intimate gun partner homicide. The percent is much higher for women, but women are a minority of gun homicide victims overall.
One surprising / not surprising other fact: ~50-75% of gun deaths involve alcohol and ~25% meth.
Gun suicide specifically affects white conservatives males and their kids more than any demographic. Either it’s access to guns, or conservatives are particularly more depressed (or maybe they lack access mental health services?). Having a friend die this way when I was in high school (and knowing no one who was shot and killed by someone else), it’s particularly real to me.
It's not like you can ask the courts to use state violence on the guy that shorted you come coke or to kick that other gang's dealer off your turf because he's already been warned once. Illegal industry has to DIY it.
To include it would be like compiling a list of extortion and including government fines and civil judgements. It dominates the stats so much that if you include it and evaluate it you're not actually looking at the thing you want to be looking at, you're measuring by proxy the size of something else. You'll wind up deriving conclusions like "most mass shooters are low level gang members" or "the threatening party in most extortion is the state" that is nominally true but also absurd doublespeak not actually congruent with the meaning of those words.
I don't personally care about what's going on in the DRC either, but I do care about the entire city being safe as I don't want to die from accidentally taking a left turn.
It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence, every day, everywhere. Have you never seen a fight/argument on the street suddenly diffuse when a cop appears? Or eg, a guy drunk at a bar, starting to raise his voice in anger at someone, only to simmer down when he sees the bartender walking over because he doesn't want to be kicked out?
Awareness of consequences is a necessary precondition for people to course-correct. That's an essential feature of people: we are able to notice when we're on course toward a bad outcome (whether that's harm to oneself, or harm to someone/something we care about, or any undesirable situation), and so take responsibility for our actions in advance so we can change course. Without that we'd be amoral creatures. This is what makes us moral beings – that we can take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. This is a good thing. It's what makes us people, and it's the basis of having a civilisation that is mostly peaceful.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.
Just figured I'd throw a cite in on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
William Golding had no special anthroplogical knowledge/training, he was just writing fiction.
We have an aversion to killing that goes further than the fear of consequences. It can be seen in the military, where soldiers naturally don't want to kill their enemies, even when they have incentives to do so. To be effective, soldiers have to be desensitized to killing through their training. Enemies are dehumanized, they train on human shaped targets, etc... And even with all that training, after a few years of active service, many start questioning their life choices. It is common for military pilots, who enlist for the love of flying, until they realize what they are really doing, i.e. killing people. When that happens, it is time to retire to a noncombatant job.
Punishing crime is not useless, but I think saying that consequences are the cause of aversion for killing is backwards. We have a natural aversion for killing, especially when we are in a prosperous situation like we (the first world) are now in. And that's why we take murder so seriously.
And speaking of murder, our natural aversion for killing shows when we see how we treat the death penalty nowadays. The death penalty is (generally) for the worst people humanity has to offer, their killing have been approved by the highest authority, and there is still opposition. We even have rituals to offload the responsibility of killing from the executioners. For example by having a random person in a firing squad fire a blank round.
It's a fairly straightforward understanding. If I said I have an aversion to the taste of steak, would you require additional information to why I don't eat steak? Or, to put it in your terms, eating steak causes a negative internal state for me and doesn't require any external consequence to make me avoid it.
>It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence
There's a problem with relying on "intuitive" understandings in some cases, especially when there is contradictory evidence. I think the term for your stance is "deterrence theory/effect." In this case, I believe there are plenty of studies that show harsher consequences do not reduce crimes rates (or at least have marginal effects). People are not rational actors, especially in highly agitated emotional states.
And let's be honest. Who would take a bullet for this CEO of one of the most despised corporations in USA (that's saying something).
I honestly think, that the general distaste for this particular industry, is why the law enforcement had such a hard time catching him.
If someone is willing to live like an absolute hermit in basically a police state, hiding behind layers and layers of security apparatus, engaging lookalikes and only allowing the loyalty-tested anywhere near him, survival odds improve quite a bit.
But for anyone trying to live anything remotely approaching a normal life, or with any real freedom, your continued survival is completely due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in your world have a personal breaker against murder.
definitely this one. there was a lot of projection of competency onto him, wanting him to be some kind of superhero assassin that would disappear. when in reality, he wasn't using that welrod pistol clone, and his gun was jamming with every shot.
but also he was self-destructive and definitely wasn't trying hard enough to not get caught. and that comes with the territory because you're not going to be well-adjusted and decide to assassinate someone in broad daylight. and i would pick self-destructive over arrogant. and he may just have not realized how distinct his facial features were.
Now he gets caught with all the incriminating evidence you could ask for? I'd say Occam's Razor points to your second theory: He's not playing some sort of 4D chess. He just decided to go kill this guy for some reason and went and did it. Dumb luck and a dense population easily explains how he was able to escape the city.
There are so many moving parts in a situation like this that it is impossible to think of everything, and the things you don’t think of will look obvious to people after the fact. The dumb luck situations that save you or screw you can be interpreted as inside knowledge. His bumbling actions afterward from the outside might seem like a “why wouldn’t he just do this instead” without thinking about how the mental toll, stress, and panic of being hunted by the whole country could degrade your judgement.
But maybe he knew it was inevitable so he spent his last few days living life normally.
Reportedly he is smart, so he probably knows the value of a good mystery.
People watch too many movies.
Why would he do all that if he wanted to get caught?
This. And HN is the perfect example to observe this phenomenon.
I lost track how many highly confident but incorrect takes I read here on semiconductor topics from people who assumed they know everything about any tech topic because they earn sich figures from writing crud web software.
It needn't be most, or even many on HN, and people of all kinds vastly overestimate their abilities. It's just that on HN it's overestimating with great ambition.
(I say this very confidently, don't I?)
Is it not Occam's razor that people are like this because this world of startups, "cutting edge tech", "move fast and break things", etc. gives quite clear incentives to be like this? The entire of financial world of tech is quite significantly propped up by the inertia of unearned confidence!
And then you become the richest man in the world and buy Twitter and show everyone that you're kind of just clueless outside of your area of expertise, but putting up with you is profitable enough that people just go with it.
People can do this repeatedly with positive feedback and increasing scope until eventually it doesn't work.
What I think happens is people who are very knowledgeable about a subject are hyper-sensitive to slightly incorrect information. And to boost their egos they like to diminish the people making the incorrect statements as not just incorrect, but confidently incorrect, a la Dunning Kruger.
See how confidently I made the exaggerative statement above? I don't necessarily mean it to be completely true, but I am making an argument. I think an assessment of confidence requires more than seeing no mollifying qualifiers like "I think" or "it might be". There's no verbal tone on the web.
(If it wasn't clear, I'm poking at the idea that we have numerous biases that prevent objective evaluation)
People think the high pay and the fancy titles* they're (often) given reflects their value or intellect*, even subconsciously, and they behave in such a manner.
*Sorry, I don't consider web programming (which comprises a majority of modern software development) "engineering"
*Many are some of the most intelligent people quite literally on Earth, or are otherwise exceptional.
If you’re told that you’re a superhuman, then why not think you can get away with it?
treating everything as a market or something to be solved with a market mechanism
People that have logic training such as lawyers and engineers even more so.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
Read his manifesto, then read this whole thread again. It's hilarious.
There are generally two ways of doing hard things. Either you are knowledgeable enough to be aware of the challenges and work around, or overcome, them. Or you are unaware, or shameless, enough to do it anyway. The later is much easier than the former. (Then you also have those who believe they could do something but never does because they can't). (Also not entirely mutually exclusive).
Sometimes this is a feature of education, but most of the time it is just a feature of ignorance. Being educated doesn't also prevent you from being ignorant. It is very much expected that most willing to do something hard are smart enough to do it, but not smart enough to do it well. Unless it's been made easier, but then it is no longer as hard.
It is also perception. Knowing both software and hardware would make you a technologist, or when talking about hardware someone who knows hardware but also knows software. Not knowing hardware but talking about it would more likely make you perceived as someone who knows software. And going back to the beginning, it is easier to think you know software than to actually know it.
Thinking he’s smarter than the rest of us is most likely a big part of his identity.
Edit: to clarify, when you go down the rabbit hole of certain bubbles, you come across terms that nobody will know unless they've gone down those same rabbit holes. Occasionally when you come up for air, you might find yourself using those terms as if they're broadly known.
You can take a person out of his ivy league STEM background but you can't take the ivy league STEM background out of a person, or something.
Why are you thinking he's incorrect? I mean, a debate can be had if bans are the correct tool, but there is a massive trend in hospitality in general (both restaurants and lodging) to de-personalize the entire experience, to take the human service out of the loop and make it invisible where it still needs to take place:
- hotel booking? no travel agents, no phone calls, anyone can just do that themselves with bookingdotcom and other aggregator service.
- hotel on-site service? no check-in at the reception, you go to a terminal, enter your booking id, get a keycard and that's it. when you check out, you close the door, dispose of the key card, and you haven't seen or interacted with any human during the entirety of your stay.
- food ordering? you sit alone at home, scroll through a list of restaurants that might not even exist ("ghost kitchens"), a computer orders a human to make the food, said anonymous person (and maybe some colleagues) makes your food, another anonymous person gets ordered by a computer to deliver it to your doorstep, and if you specify a non-contact delivery you didn't have to interact with a single human for anything. And I think it won't take long for the cooks to be replaced by machines as well, delivery robots are already a thing.
- on site food eating: you don't order at a server any more, you order at a terminal, a tablet or even your own phone, the computer dispatches cooks and servers, some even don't have human servers any more but only robots or running-sushi-style conveyor belts, and in the end you pay at a machine.
So yes, "running sushi" is definitely a good example how human to human interactions are outright eliminated from our lives.
Unfortunately there's just not enough time in the day to really dig into the issues he's grappling with when there's an overwelming course load of databases and physics etc.
We innovate because we like being comfortable. We don’t want to tend to a fire constantly to be warm. We don’t want to depend on the randomness of hunting/foraging to have a full belly. We don’t want to take days and days of travel to go a few towns over. We don’t want to have to deal with people we don’t know because that’s anxiety inducing.
So we invent all those things that means many modern humans can just stay comfy, warm and fed at home with all their basic needs met without having to go through all this discomfort.
The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless (and to top it all the planet is on fire).
None of that is true. You're projecting what some people struggle with onto everyone, when the data indicates people are better off today. And mental health issues aren't unique to the industrialized world. Also, the planet is warming, but it's not on fire. Total exaggeration.
And what "data" would that be?
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/03/new-surgeon-genera...
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/10/wha...
https://www.bib.bund.de/EN/News/2024/2024-05-29-FReDA-Policy...
And what "purpose" are people looking forward to?
> Also, the planet is warming, but it's not on fire. Total exaggeration.
What does that even mean? It's not literally burning, so it's fine? Because you say so?
> And what "purpose" are people looking forward to?
What, you don't find increasing shareholder value compelling?
> It's not literally burning, so it's fine?
Presumably they think the climage catastrophe is not a big deal. "On fire" is clearly hyperbole but the point is that we're on a fast track to total global economic collapse (to say nothing about the death and destruction itself) as long as the answer is to carefully do some ineffective reductions and give more money to the industry to spend on "carbon capture" technology that creates more emissions in the process of being built, maintained and operated than it could ever hope to capture, but I digress.
On the one hand you have overblown expectations of success and commitment to work for men, on the other you have an expectation of submissiveness, docility and youthful purity for women, but in reality most men can't be high earners, most women need to work the same grueling hours to make a living and it all just ends up making everyone unhappy and lonely because nobody can live up to the expectations both instilled in them from a young age and placed on them by their peers and failure is not an option. Not to mention that the concept of dedication to your employer has become completely detached from the previously implied reward of the company's loyalty to their lifelong committed workers, too.
The situation in "the West" (let's say the US) is comparable in some ways, certainly, but the gendered expectations are much less intense and there are at least some options to socialize outside the work environment and as bad as labor protections are, people don't literally die at work.
I’m sorry are these supposed to be extremists? These are status quo western liberals, secular humanists, and science enthusiasts.
> retrograde
Is this a derogatory term in the human progress narrative?
"many of those who participate were formerly part of the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements. [...] What makes TPOT a "post-rational" community is an interest in topics that are not traditionally rationalist, such as spirituality, occultism and conspiracy theories."
https://x.com/SyeClops/status/1866353712148685002
Doesn’t seem to me like he has a superiority complex. He is devastated by his mother’s illness and the actions of United Healthcare.
Why would someone post a typed version rather than a photo of the real thing (which they would need to have to be able to type it up)?
I have seen this happen people do this with programming / CAD / 3D modeling / various crafts etc.
You see this all the time where people on HN, Reddit, wherever, will act as though roughing in the plumbing and electrical for a home addition is comparable in complexity and fraught with similar nuances as doing all the process electrical and plumbing for an industrial facility when it very much not.
I’m curious about what exactly prompted whoever called him in to become suspicious - was the profile released from photos good enough? Or was he acting suspiciously with his backpack?
Even if you try to destroy the evidence, evidence of you destroying the evidence works just as well for a lot of cases.
- The intelligent individual is also self-absorbed and believed that they would be able to continue to kill CEOs without getting caught. A narcissistic streak that allowed them to make no attempt at concealing their identity in public. They kept the weapon in order to move to a new target (or they 3D printed an identical if the reports of a 3D printed gun are correct). They believed they would either not get caught or that the public would not turn them in. They may have envisioned themselves the Ted of Healthcare.
At some point you know you’ve already been caught.
Where he will finally get decent health care for free.
Let's say he shuts up and gets a lawyer. His lawyer can say that maybe the real gunman noticed he looked similar, then switched bags on a bus. It's weak, but it's something.
If he tossed it in NYC, he leaves possible DNA at the scene. If he tosses it at home, the cops will likely find it and take his disposal as an admission of guilt.
IANAL but while I guess it's not good to have your lawyer run the Shaggy defence ("it wasn't me!") if the police have made an effort in the investigation then there's a surprising chance they'll find the evidence anyway.
At the very least that could be his rationale.
He didn't know if they had a van watching his house, and if his bins were being collected by the police. He might have been too scared and paranoid to do anything.
I can see someone planning meticulously the murder, the immediate fleeing thereafter but not the rest. If I remember images, he wasn't wearing gloves so he may have had to clean it before he planned to get rid of it. Plus he may have hit hiccups in the process that may have derailed part of his plans. The fact he had cash both in local and foreign money probably means he had planned to move out of the country but was kind of waiting for the dust to settle.
I talked to someone personally who at some point had committed a series of crimes, and at some point they started doing things that were more and more likely to get them caught; they told me they thought to themselves, "What am I doing?" But they didn't stop, and eventually got caught.
In a different story, a few years ago I dropped my wallet on the sidewalk outside my house, and someone picked it up and tried to use one of the credit cards in it. Then they got in a fight which got them arrested; and the police found my wallet (with my ID and everything) in their possession. Why get in a fight that's going to get you arrested just at the moment when you have stolen property in your pocket?
My take is this: We present to others, and even ourselves, the illusion that there's just one unified "self"; but really inside there are a number of independent motivations within us. In both cases above, I think there was a part of those people who felt guilty and actually did want to be caught and punished.
It's possible there was something similar going on with the guy who shot the CEO: one part of him had managed to plan everything perfectly so that he could get away; but there was a saboteur. It couldn't ahead of time prevent him from doing the shooting, but it could afterwards prevent him from disposing of the evidence and ensure that he got caught.
I have a different take. Assuming his crime is driven by his beliefs/mission, not being found will not further it. Logically you may argue that it would afford him more chances to carry on but given that we assume him to be driven by strong and passionate belief, he would want to be clearly and explicitly recognized for those beliefs and would want those thoughts to take center stage of public opinion. Carrying evidence also is his way of broadcasting the signal that he doesn't care about getting caught since he did the right thing and has nothing to be ashamed of.
I'm not so sure in this case. It would have been hard for the perpetrator to predict beforehand, but there was so little public sympathy for the victim, and there are lot of people who said they would not help the police catch him. Him getting away would have shown that insurance companies are so terrible and so hated that the public is OK with the murder of those responsible (because if they weren't, they'd help the police and he'd be caught).
Escape would have sent a much stronger message than whatever he could hope to accomplish by grandstanding in a courtroom.
That is already proven to a large extent. Sure police are doing their job because of the pressure they have and someone working at McDonald's wants to collect tens of thousands of dollars, but it is pretty clear that he has significant public support based on the outpouring of support in the recent days.
> Escape would have sent a much stronger message
No, escape would have just shown that he is good at hiding. Effectively giving himself up gave an even bigger stage for him to place his point. And he got a lot more coverage by delaying that instead of immediate surrender.
> than whatever he could hope to accomplish by grandstanding in a courtroom.
What is grandstanding for you could be advocacy for another. Only time can tell whether it accomplishes anything.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I know I am not doing my body and health a favor. There's a tool called journaling, but I am not even using it right now. It's a very useful tool to get your mind into thinking "wait, this doesn't make sense", or "why am I behaving this way?"
Everyday, I say to myself that I am speeding up my decline in health, and yet nothing changes(because I don't journal).
Eric Berne in one of the pop psy books makes a claim which to me rings true -- that the real criminals don't get caught, the ones that get caught are the ones that want to play hide & seek as a trauma response from childhood -- there's a very deep drive to be sought after and found and those people, because of absent parents and lack of attention didn't get to play it out, so they really do want to be discovered in their sub-conscious mind.
It’s typically asked about. If you know about it and lie, that’s perjury.
As for "lying" here, it's an interesting metaphysical question. Because you're not lying (or telling the truth) about some observable event, it's simply your own state of mind. If somebody asks "Why did you vote not guilty", you simply say "I didn't believe the evidence was convincing". There is literally no way for anyone else to say otherwise.
Nullification needs to be unanimous. You'd get in trouble when pitching nullification to your fellow jurors. (Or at the very least, have a mistrial declared.)
> people aren't excluded (at least by the judge) for just knowing what the concept is
If you want a surefire way to get off a jury, mention nullification in voir dire. (Hell, just ask innocently about it.)
Nullification absolutely does not need to be unanimous, and it rarely is. All it takes is one juror force a mistrial (and another if it is retried, etc.) Sure, the prosecutor would likely retry, but again, it just takes one juror out of twelve to cause a mistrial, and the vast majority of prosecutors don't prosecute indefinitely.
> If you want a surefire way to get off a jury, mention nullification in voir dire.
No shit, so don't mention it.
...this isn't nullification. A major point of nullification is a not-guilty verdict by a jury is final. No retrial. No appeal.
> the vast majority of prosecutors don't prosecute indefinitely
You think this case wouldn't be re-tried?
I do. The educated, well-to-do, urban bubble has convinced itself—again—that this guy is universally adored. Because we’re mistaking—again—the difference between a symbol and the object, a mistake amplified by those who get their world view primarily from Twitter, Reddit, et cetera.
Jury nullification wouldn't have mattered and it was settled in an hour, but it was interesting. But I had been warned by multiple lawyer friends this might happen.
Even more wasteful as this was the 3rd strike so the difference between assault and aggravated was 25 or 26 years, aka no difference. And the defendant had pleaded down already. Finally it was obvious it wasn't aggravated for several reasons and the prosecution was just fishing for convictions. Basically took 2 extra days of everyone's time fishing for sentence elevations.
Why is that? Was it just the sentencing phase?
how do I know this? the defense attorney and the prosecutor both went to bars in my neighborhood. I got both of them drinks and asked them for the back story on the case.
Also, IIRC, the court system is pretty against it. The judge won't instruct the jury on it and I very much doubt he'd let the defense attorney bring it up to the jury either.
Jury selection throws a wrench in the system, lawyers have a chance to ask questions under oath and get rid of jurors for most any reason. As i understand it, its pretty common for them to try to ferret out anyone that may go the nullification route.
Is it also legal for jurors to ignore orders not to discuss the case, post about deliberations on Facebook, or decide the case based on race?
Orders and instructions are different though. An official order by a judge may fall under contempt of court if you don't comply. Instructions are more procedural and about a judge running the process of the trial. For deliberation, that also generally means instructions that really just help guide a jury of people who may not have done it before and aren't sure of the process or general expectations.
The issue is that proving why a juror voted a certain way is kind of tough. The beautiful part is that this is a feature, not a bug.
Its interesting you meant that rhetorically, your premise is wrong in my opinion. If you want to distinguish between an instruction and an order I'd think it has to be based on how it can be enforced. An instruction can't be enforced by a judge, for example they can instruct you to only consider what was presented but they can't punish you if you disobey that.
Judges will be careful not to directly give instructions against nullification for precisely that reason. They may very well imply that you shouldn't go off the rails of evidence provided or laws and precedent as described, but that's as far as a judge can go with instructions against nullification.
In extremely high profile cases like the ones featuring Donald Trump, courts focus on selecting jurors who can remain fair and impartial despite their knowledge of the case or their own personal opinions. They'll go through extensive vetting which can include written questionnaires, interviews, oral questioning about their media consumption, their political beliefs and potential biases, and so on.
That said its a very far leap to assume (either as the suspect or as a third party) that because this suspect has a lot of online sympathy that that will translate to a jury both willing and knowledgeable enough to nullify. Certainly wouldn't bet my life or freedom on that myself.
Personally I lean toward doubting that getting caught was part of some master plan. People have this binary view of things where he's either got to be a criminal mastermind who thought of everything or a complete fool, and the reality is probably that he's a better than average premeditated murderer (given all of what is stacked against him) who still got caught due to a combination of bad luck and being a little bit careless. Considering how extensive the current surveillance state is he got closer to getting away with it than the vast majority of people would have, but also combined that with some stupid but perfectly naturally human oversights.
I’d guess at least 1 in ten thousand per annum. Which would equate to hundreds of newly deranged developers per year in the US.
And boy howdy, the sparks will fly then
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
I’m not saying it’s not exactly what it looks like, just kinda makes me think huh. Either the perp really wanted to be caught, or someone really wants to close this case. I’m going with he wanted to be caught, since he’s apparently not an actual idiot.
So just a relatively smart privileged dude swept away by dark ideology? It wouldn’t be the first time. If there’s any more to it, we won’t likely know.
He "became quiet and started to shake" when asked if he had recently been to New York, according to the criminal complaint filed in Pennsylvania.
Being smart can lead to arrogance, which leads to stumbles. like carrying evidence, dining in public, etc.
Bodies of water are popular for disposing of things, because it's a huge PITA to find things there. Imagine how hard it might be in a large local pond, and then multiply that in complexity for a rather big river. Or an inland sea like the Great Lakes. Don't even multiply for those; it's a stupidly big irrelevant number.
He totally did. Find a trash can, and put it in (though maybe disassemble the gun first, and dispose of it in pieces in multiple locations).
Why you'd eat-in at a fast food place rather than just go via some low level Chinese takeaway though!
Exactly. A gun, even without ammo, still allows you to get out of hairy situations: steal a car, force someone to drive you somewhere, etc
>Why you'd eat-in at a fast food place rather than just go via some low level Chinese takeaway though!
Maybe he though he'd be more anonymous in a major fast food chain, and you stand out more in a Chinese place.
That's not this guy.
What are the magic words? I don’t know them, but I know that the lawyers who work for police unions know them and the trainers who train police officers drill those into the heads of officers.
The core problem with the jurisprudence: if a reasonable officer had a fear for themself or for members of the public, then fatal shootings in the line of duty are usually justified. The objective facts at the scene don’t matter; only the officer’s perception. If only all citizens were given the same rights…
Did you not understand my post, or do you not believe my claim?
The objective facts (as established by a body cam) matter very little, only a good faith belief that “I feared for my life or the life of someone in the public”.
Why? The burden of proof is “Innocent until proven guilty” and like I said, the onus is on the prosecution to prove that the officer’s statement that “they feared for their life” was a lie at the time of the incident. That’s extremely difficult to prove, especially when an officer has been on the job for a while and has been conditioned to use the right words to CYA.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/search-new-york-subway-gunm...
Wife is a GP doctor, maybe 1/3rd of her patients have some form of this.
Can you really not think of anyone where it would be better if they were... not there anymore?
2. This guy has a terminal illness.
3. This guy is bankrupt after healthcare debt + buying backpacks.
I've stayed at that place multiple times, though years ago.
They did check ID, but never copied it.
I wonder how they knew it was fake.
They recorded name on reservation and maybe DOB.
The place had cameras everywhere apart from inside rooms and bathrooms.
I can't believe that was the only time they got him on camera.
>They recorded name on reservation and maybe DOB.
I'm sure the cops can run the same name/DOB combination through the databases of all 50 states + DC, and rule out any that don't match the surveillance footage.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian...
“I was informed... that defendant presented a forged New Jersey Driver’s License with the name of Mark Rosario as his identification, which based on the number on it was the same identification defendant presented at the hostel,"
So the hostel saved at least the number.
This was not the case at least 2 years ago. I'm absolutely certain.
The hostel had none. They never copied it.
They never wrote ID numbers either.
They checked the name and that was it.
Unless it changed in the last year or so.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian...
I assumed he had some help with the timing via the burner phone
But this all looks very lone wolfish now
If real, he scheduled a post to be released everyday at ~6pm EST. If he wasn't caught that day he would delete the scheduled post, and reschedule for the next day at 6pm.
I say 6 because it was the earliest snapshot of the site. Looks like the post just got taken down off sub stack and I can't view the exact time of post.
That's likely how it happened
You might know about their public appearances such as for shareholder meetings but how would you know which hotel they're staying at and that they would leave said hotel at 6:45 AM(!) and walk(!!) to the meeting venue?
Either massive luck on the shooter's side or there is a source of information that hasn't been discovered yet.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
all of those you are referring to are not plastered 24/7 over all media world-wide
He was presumably en route somewhere. Disposing of a fake ID such that forensics can’t get anything useful off it isn’t easily done on the run / incognito. (And if his inspiration is the Unabomber, he presumably had more targets.)
You're going to take time away from your actual escape to make yourself less incriminating in case you are caught? Should he have been grinding up IDs at the Greyhound bus terminal in New York? Right after the whole city heard about the shooting? Or should he have waited until after the FBI plastered the nation with his face?
> if you owned a pair of scissors or a lighter or something
Scissors won't take care of fingerprints, let alone DNA. As for the lighter, again, where do you propose he do this without attracting attention?
Actually, I could see him having thought this would be easy to do, maybe even packing a lighter and scissors, only to realise in execution that you can't start burning IDs on a bus without someone noticing.
You can just deface it in any way and throw it out the window on a highway or into any trash can and it will quite literally never be found.
No. But you don't know how far behind they are when you dispose of it. It only becomes random plastic after they've lost your trail.
> can just deface it in any way and throw it out the window on a highway or into any trash can
Sure. Or you can keep it until it can be safely disposed of. Which carries fewer risks? We don't even have to hypothesise, we know for a fact that the IDs on his person didn't cause him to get caught. We also know him not having the IDs on him wouldn't have caused him to be less caught.
Now I'm not a valedictorian, but I'd like to think I could achieve that.
Trial for this could be hugely publicized
I wonder if cops were monitoring major news offices because of this.
Many people have not been bent over by insurance, but that's the less confusing part of this post.
Almost everyone who has been bent over by insurance will still find someone who assassinated another dude guilty.
Similarly, a defendant's race is not relevant to their guilt, but you're not going to pick a self-declared racist if you don't have to.
They won't have trouble seating a jury, and he'll be convicted of 1st degree homicide and spend the rest of his adult life in prison.
1. https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/poll-finding/kff-surve...
But if you’re unlucky, it can ruin your life or the life of a loved one. It’s not hard to find horror stories - some recent viral ones came from LinkedIn comments to the CEO (written before his murder)
That is seriously underestimating the attention span of law enforcement. I’m not saying that they would have caught him for sure, but they have motivation and means to keep looking far longer than a few weeks.
> Being on the lam implies they knew his identity; they did not.
At the minimum they had a picture of his face. That stuff will stay in databases indefinietly and face recognition is only getting better. They might have had his DNA from objects he interacted with or things he discarded. They could have traced his burner phone to locations he previously frequented, or where he bought it from. They could have traced him via video surveilance further along his escape and tied him to a location or a car.
None of this is guaranteed to work. There is a certain amount of luck involved. But just because after a few days they didn’t know who he is, doesn’t mean they could not have found him months or years down the road.
I feel like I'm seeing them more and more.
The killer didn't do any hunting. They did shooting and running.
All of this is besides the central point, which is that a killer would likely be on the run from detectives and maybe PIs for the rest of their lives.
> the rest of their lives
Only if any of their adversaries survive with sufficient will to fight.
I know a lot of game hunters who would say that’s pretty much the definition of hunting.
They're (attempts at) a bon mot
No but please let me know when you find one! And indeed you are correct, this is a fairly new pattern and it's absolutely increasing.
I would bet a lot of the healthcare CEO's are totally surprised that anyone would want to harm them.
I certainly wouldn’t work evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays, not to mention sacrifice my life during my 20s. And be around gross stuff and sad people.
And especially not when you can earn a comparable profit working behind keyboard.
I don’t understand what this means. A group of doctors get together and open a business offering their services, and they distribute profits into their bank accounts. Or a dentist, or an optometrist, or a podiatrist.
Why would 99% of people do this work if they cannot profit?
> A decent compromise is what most countries do, which is that citizens pay a fixed sum for health insurance which covers most of the basic expenses.
That is just health insurance with $0 deductible/copays. Some US employers do offer this, and some even pay 100% of the premiums.
But these plans don’t sell well to the broader public, because most people would prefer (or can only afford) a lower premium and accept the volatility of having to spend a few hundred or a few thousand before insurance kicks in.
In some (many?) countries the options for private healthcare are limited (by design) and public healthcare takes care of people. Not in USA though. :) It has its pros and cons, but to be honest, neither system works very well. I would pick a public one anytime, but maybe it's just because I know it.
> Why would 99% of people do this work if they cannot profit?
They do profit, and should - they get a paycheck for their work.
I have a 3.5 year old toddler and it sure feels hard on my soul right now (he just behaved the worst he's ever behaved in daycare today, to the point that they had to isolate him... and this is me dealing with it after only 3 hours of sleep, since he also keeps waking up every night ever since he turned 3... "sleep regression" should be called "slow parricide via toddler non-sleep")
Wahlgren, Anna (2009). A Good Night's Sleep - This is how you can truly help your baby to sleep through the night. Anna Wahlgren AB. ISBN 9789197773614
Sleep deprivation makes your life so miserable. And it does so for the toddler as well. My daughter couldn't learn to walk and kept falling over because, well, she was just too exhausted.
It seems the book isn't as well known in the US (where I'm assuming you are) as it is in Europe, and maybe there are equivalent approaches from American authors as well. But this is the one that solved the problem and taught her to sleep in 4 - four - nights.
My wife and I applied the stuff from the book from Dec.1st to Dec.4th of 2018. My daughter has not had trouble sleeping her 11+ hours straight a single night since then (that was 6 years ago) except a couple of times when she was teething.
I was recently asked on a (business) podcast what was the top book that changed my life and that was it. To think you could struggle for such a long time, and suddenly find out you could change that in 4 days... I have tears in my eyes whenever I talk about it.
Anyway. Long message to wish you well, internet stranger. It will get better.
Just like, trying to describe the lifestyle changes that got you in shape (which are always going to be the same 4-5 basic things), is less helpful than telling someone "go to the same coach/book I went to, and give it a try".
But in a nutshell, the book teaches a few simple principles of why kids wake up/cry and how what we (as parents) typically do to console the child actually sends the message that "sleeping in this bed is not safe".
Once you get that, it gives you a 4-day (and 4-nights) routine to follow to get the baby/toddler/infant/child to re-learn that this is a safe place, your parents are around, you can go back to sleep. Doing the full 4 days is a two-person job (my wife and I rented a room at the hotel next door and took turns with one of us sleeping there while the other was with our daughter at home).
We followed everything to the letter ; the first couple of days is timed very precisely and you take notes in a journal as you go, which is how I can tell you that we were already tearing up when our daughter slept in 3-hour chunks the 2nd night, did an almost 8-hour streak on night 3 and pulled a full 11-hour night on night 4.
I'll tell you, the least important part of the whole thing is a short lullaby we came up with as we were going to the 4 days, and I still sing that to my daughter 6 years later as I leave her for the night, as this has become a bit of a talisman for me :-) Definitely not needed anymore but I'll probably sing her this song until she leaves for college or tells me to shut up!
If only I knew what steps to follow on those 4 precious nights...
"Paperback: From $473"
Yikes. :/
Can't find an ebook of it either...
Willing to sell it or pass it along? (Best Christmas ever? lol)
Thank you for the kind thoughts regardless. It really is a struggle, to say the least.
I'm going to have a look at whether there's a more popular author with a similar philosophy.
I'm sorry, maybe it's not my place, but... Please listen to him. Children are not stupid, they just lack experience. If he behaves some way then there is a reason for it. The usual suspect is lack of attention (which is very important for a child), since they get more of it (even if in form of punishment) for behaving "badly"... The outcome is predictable.
I found that treating them as adults when it comes to respecting their wishes goes a long way towards raising a good person.
Again, sorry for an unsolicited advice from a random person on the internet. Especially as it sounds like life is very stressful for you right now. Fingers crossed everything gets better soon.
The stuff found on him is irrelevant, they'd pin him down with dna and whatever other evidence.
I try not to overreact to stuff online, but this took me a bit by surprise. Things really feel like a melting pot at the moment, with so much pent up anger amongst people who actually lead pretty decent lives.
It's because the whole image is fake. In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, and the power of an institution to decide about someone else's life or death is just one aspect of it; prices inflated beyond imagination is another one (these two are related). So we pretend to live normal lives but in the back of our head we pray we don't ever need to become a victim of this system. But on the outside yes, it looks like everything is fine and we have decent lives.
Be it a privately run for profit insurance system that runs on perverse incentives, or a government agency that runs on power and influence and corruption.
Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
I had my appendix out a few years ago, I walked into the ER at 2PM, had the surgery done by midnight, and was able to be discharged by 9AM the next day. The only cost was my parking, because I drove myself over. Meanwhile, I've also had friends in the US who were clearly quite ill, and made the conscious decision to not go to the ER because it would have cost them hundreds of dollars.
It's all a balance, but I'm happier with my single pay system, because for the most part, health decisions aren't at the whim of my bank balance being too low. I personally wouldn't be as disappointed in the US system, if the reason someone can get a surgery immediately didn't balance out with something like UnitedHealthcare's 32% rejection rate, because someone wanted a $10MM / yr salary or a $40MM yacht.
https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...
Although, if increasing the rejection rate allows the insurance company to decrease individual premiums, which causes a lot more people to sign up for coverage due to low cost, that could increase total premium income, total spent on healthcare, and salaries.
Not to mention Canadian expats are generally the ones who would be able to afford the American healthcare costs.
Why can’t the US just copy paste them? It’s not like single payer is the only option..
https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...
and Swiss doctors are paid very well compared to let say German ones. There is long waiting list of German doctors that would like to practice in Switzerland.
When you remove profit from the equation, you also remove the incentive to increase supply.
The same is true for those working in healthcare.
United healthcare wouldn't even exist if there was a ton of people who wanted to found, fund, and work at nonprofit health insurance companies.
Do you think doctors and nurses work for free in countries with socialized healthcare?
They do get paid. A lot if you're a specialist too - it's a very lucrative field to be in. Admittedly, not for everyone - nurses and junior doctors usually don't get paid very well, but it's my understanding that in US it's not like these professions make bank either.
>>if there was a ton of people who wanted to found, fund, and work at nonprofit health insurance companies.
That's the whole point that Americans are missing - you don't need the insurance companies in the first place, if the entire system is owned by the public. You go to a hospital, you get an operation done and that's it, at no point is there anyone sitting there are processing your "claim" - if the operation is one allowed by the system(and it almost certainly is) then it's just done and the system pays for it from general taxation budget. No one negotiates rates with the hospital, argues about your excess or premiums or in or out of network coverage. Health insurance is something you get for travelling abroad, like if you have an accident while skiing and need a helicopter to get you out, not for visiting a doctor or a hospital.
>When you remove profit from the equation, you also remove the incentive to increase supply.
Yes, socialized system countries have doctors because they pay doctors, ensuring supply. This proves the point above.
If you pay people to do something, you get more of it.
Health insurance companies dont provide healthcare. They dont stich you up or manufacture pills. They are in the business of vetting and denying claims to ration healthcare provided by others.
>No one negotiates rates with the hospital, argues about your excess or premiums or in or out of network coverage. Health insurance is something you get for travelling abroad, like if you have an accident while skiing and need a helicopter to get you out, not for visiting a doctor or a hospital.
It works different in various socialized systems, but there is always someone negotiating with the hospital, the workers, and the manufacturers. Sometimes this is the government, sometimes it is private insurance.
I dont know which country you are talking about, but almost every country has some sort of Health Insurance. What differs is the level of involvement by the citizens in selecting it.
A classic example would be Germany, which is a multiple payer system with both government and private insurance. 85% percent of people have the government health insurance, which is paid by employers and employees and mandatory. the government manages and negotiates rates for this plan. You can opt out and get private insurance instead, and those insurers have sperate negotiations and offer different services. There is also supplemental insurance, also private, also negotiated separate.
And yes, of course you can supplement that with private insurance if you wish, but vast majority of people don't.
And yes, of course the government negotiates with providers - but when you get treated that's not something that affects you. You don't get a bill that says "your treatment was £10k, but the goverment will only pay £5k, cough up the rest". In fact no one(patients) gets any bills ever.
I think the vast majority of countries have some sort of a situation with the government as at least one of the payers, and Private health care providers.
I completely agree that the US is an outlier in how involved the patient is in the payment of their healthcare, and the fact that they can be left with the bill instead of the provider if the insurance is denied.
On a psychological level, I think people are more frustrated by being offered care that they can't afford and dealing with uncertain coverage then not being offered the care at all.
I'm a huge proponent of healthcare reform in the US. That's sad, I think one of the biggest problems with getting it past is unreal expectations. Americans have a caricature of European healthcare in their mind that is totally inaccurate.
> No one negotiates rates with the hospital
No one negotiates period. Coverage decisions are made unilaterally by government officials, and services that those officials deem too expensive are simply not offered. The same issue exists with medical equipment. The wait time for an MRI is absurd in eg. Canada because government only funded so many machines. In the states there are simply more machines, because supply was more elastic, and more freely able to meet demand.
>>when patients in the US with appropriately good insurance receive them as first line with far better outcomes.
The problem I have with that is basically you're saying the quality of the treatment depends on what insurance you have. In socialized healthcare everyone gets the same treatment.
And in fact this is reflected in the average quality of care received on average, with outcomes in US being much worse than elsewhere. US has mortality from "preventable causes" twice as bad as Australia, Japan or France(paragraph 5). So in US few people get amazing care better than anywhere else. And most people get worse care than anywhere else.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/blogs/comp...
>>Things like cutting edge cancer treatments (often developed in the US) are many years late arriving to public healthcare systems.
Obviously it's hard to make a general statement on this because every country has varied policies around this. But to share an anecdote - my own dad was enrolled into an experimental programme at a leading oncology hospital in Poland because he had a very rare and ultra aggressive cancer which had no known treatment other than a brand new(then) Glivec, which wasn't even approved for that cancer yet, but he had the whole course of his treatment fully funded under our socialized healthcare. In those very very rare cases where regular treatment is not available there are avenues to explore experimental treatments, and they then serve to direct general treatment plans for the rest of the population. Again, this is a specific example from one country.
> people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it
You get what you sign up for. Like in any business transaction, doing your due diligence and understanding the details of both parties obligation is table stakes. We also have courts precisely for cases when such disputes become intractable.
> so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process.
No one is stopping you from paying for the drugs yourself. Insurance will reimburse you once they validate your claim. Bureaucracy takes time.
> the average quality of care received on average
And the quality of care on the upper end is markedly worse in many ways. Wealthy people from all over the world travel to the US for their medical procedures for a reason. You're effectively arguing that net-contributors to society (people who pay a lot of taxes) should accept an increase in their tax burden for the privilege of a degradation in their personal access to and quality of care, in order to bring up the average. I hope you appreciate just how directly this opposes the interests of this class.
> From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
You can't have a system like this in a free country. I want the freedom to associate (in an insurance pool) alongside other people with a similar risk profile to myself (eg. no drinking/drugs/smoking, daily exercise, good sleep, healthy body composition) to the exclusion of others. I want my insurance company to carefully scrutinize its applicants and claimants, on my behalf, to ensure that my interests are being well-represented. Insurance does not mean absolution from personal responsibility.
Same for state employed healthcare professionals, which have salary set by the state.
That's like saying 2+2=5, then when someone points it out, saying the sky is blue.
This is just completely not true. Take France and Germany for example.
> Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
So anesthesiologists should be able to ask for any amount their heart desires and the insurance is the bad guy if they don’t want to pay it? Anesthesiologists have a profit motive too, you know.
> Does Germany have free public healthcare? Yes, all Germans and legal residents of Germany are entitled to free “medically necessary” public healthcare, which is funded by social security contributions. However, citizens must still have either state or private health insurance, covering at least hospital and outpatient medical treatment and pregnancy.
Obviously not; if they're billing 72 hours a day, that's fraud.
If my procedure goes long because of a complication, I'd still prefer they not wake me up mid-procedure for a credit card and signature.
But it was presented in popular media as if the insurance company was trying to shift the cost of overlong procedures onto the patient, rather than onto the anesthesiologists. Thankfully there was a public outcry and the anesthesiologists won, well-deservedly so considering they must be barely scraping by on a median income of $470,000/year.
The policy even had a path for the anesthesiologist to justify the overrun so that portion could be covered too. No doubt Anthem would scrutinize the justification closely and reject cases where they detect abuse, and the incentives are for Anthem to be too strict, but there was nothing wrong with the policy on its face. These sorts of things are absolutely necessary in order to drive healthcare costs, which are absolutely obscene, down.
No system could afford to spend unlimited amounts for anyone wanting it. You get triaged since resources are not infinite.
Pick your favorite system, say the UK, and google UK healthcare rationing to find state policy on what limits people face.
Here is the govt Medicare page about Medicare Advantage Plans, with references to all the pages of legislation and Medicare rules such plans must comply with.
https://www.medicare.gov/health-drug-plans/health-plans/your...
For example, select “What should I know about Medicare Advantage Plans?”
It states, among other things, “ Medicare Advantage Plans provide all of your Part A (Hospital Insurance) and Part B (Medical Insurance) benefits (also called “Original Medicare”), including new benefits that come from laws or Medicare policy decisions”.
Op claims Medicare “always” provides PT, which is not true. Here’s some rules about it: https://www.healthline.com/health/medicare/does-medicare-cov...
Note in particular Medicare advantage will provide any PT where Medicare would.
If you look at peer reviewed research, MA outperforms M in outcomes and satisfaction by a slight amount.
These are reasons why forming or reinforcing beliefs on anecdotes and not understanding the truth is a bad way to make claims.
So now that you see this outcome was medical care “set and enforced by the government” and not the outcome from “anonymous profit-seeking insurance company board members,” will you redirect your outrage?
I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good.
My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance.
However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore.
The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved.
After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back.
Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids.
The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked.
She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed.
BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later.
You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........
How many people die for greed? Is that not violence?
- Kendrick Lamar
The incentives are pro-social: insurance companies have an incentive to delay payouts, because their profits come from interest (they pay out more money than they take in) so the longer they can hold onto money the better. But that's reversed for this hypothetical loan issuer - they want to make the payout as fast as possible in order to earn as much interest as possible as quickly as possible.
And if there's a systematic tendency for medicaid advantage plans to deny claims that eventually get approved, and if you could predict which ones will get approved 'just' by really understanding what medicaid would approve, then this might be self-sustaining or even profitable?
If any such niche existed, for any system, then this niche would be the system.
What possible benefit to the patient is having a whole bureaucracy sit between the gov't insurance and the person in need of medical care? It only exists to make money off the backs of the people they are harming.
Now, if you don't know why people sign up for them, you don't understand what they are doing. My mom, like many others, was on a fixed income. If you sign up for a medicare advantage plan, they will do things like give you an extra $100 a month to you directly. Why would insurance be willing to PAY you? Because they make all their money billing medicare and denying you coverage.
18 billion in profits last year running a middle man between patients and medicare
Why would the government introduce an intermediary in the first place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_Budget_Act_of_1997
> The act had a five-year savings goal and a ten-year savings goal following its enactment in 1997. The five-year savings goal was $116.4 billion which would be achieved by limiting growth rates in payments to hospitals and physicians under fee-for-service arrangements.[7]
>This plan also involved the change of the methods of payment made to rehabilitation hospitals, home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, and outpatient service agencies as well as the reduction of payments to Medicare managed care plans and the slowing of growth rates of these same care plans.[7]
>The ten-year savings goal was $393.8 billion using the same savings methods as the five-year goal to achieve the savings in 2007.[7]
Nah, better to have millionaires lying to the sick and dying about the company not having the money to pay for the coverage that the sick person paid a hefty monthly premium to provide.
The solution would be to remove useless leeches providing no value or benefit to anyone other than shareholders, not add more of them.
And what do you know, most of the rest of the developed world has managed to do that. And even the parts that have private healthcare have managed to put strict rules controlling it, and costs and outcomes are much better.
And for all of that, you’re stuck paying at least 20% of everything, on top of separate deductibles for each part and no out of pocket caps at all (meaning Medicare isn’t even an ACA compliant health care plan). Part C simplifies this for so many people by rolling all of Part B, Part D and usually vision and dental into a single premium and puts out of pocket caps on the amount of money you might need to shell out. Is it any wonder people keep choosing Part C even if it means their providers have to fight the insurance more?
The other MCOs all had net income less than $8B (CVS/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/etc).
There is no way a business earned a profit of $18B just from Medicare and it not being visible on their net income figures.
That is not to say Medicare Advantage is good for most customers (the common advice is to stay away from it), but fantastical numbers don’t help arguments.
But even supposing that the business earns $18B from Medicare Advantage after all is said and done, it doesn’t pass the smell test because at that level of profit, these businesses should shut everything else down and just do Medicare Advantage.
It really makes me sad, but thank you for sharing your story.
If y'all feel that way, why don't you vote for a "socialist" healthcare system like we have over here in communist Europe?
I mean, I'm over here in Germany and I'm not going to claim the system is that great, but it's really not half bad either, and it does seem to prevent the most extreme tragedies.
A number of states have implemented individual mandates; including Massachusetts under Mitt Romney.
It seems quite clear that you'd get it if you (collectively) voted that way, or not for candidates who very actively oppose it.
I get that system needs to push folks into working hard and motivate exceptional efforts (and luck), but sometimes this goes into properly bad directions where few gain and majority loses. In any functional society, all this is never isolated and it has ripple effects.
No merely healthcare, but employment, housing etc. It's easy to single out healthcare for obvious reasons.
Suffice it to say, constructive criticism is vital for democratic improvement.
That's a weird conclusion. For me, it's rather "The USA has its flaws (for me - healthcare and higher education financing above all) so we as a society should focus on fixing these problems". Killing people or leaving the country are not solutions, they are are an equivalent of short Twitter replies on a nuanced subject.
- You
Kill one person by putting lead in their heart at high speed and now it’s a serious crime. If the victim is Important then you get a massive manhunt and national news coverage.
Flint, Michigan
I wish this was an attempt at a joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxhmOfk-L5Q
Lyrics here https://www.angolotesti.it/C/testi_canzoni_caparezza_1135/te...
I figured that. It feels a little like the country is going crazy.
Don't worry. We're already drifting back to sleep.
Air pollution alone kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. More die from air pollution than die from what’s legally defined as murder, by a substantial margin. How many people are in prison for it? Most of that pollution it outright legal. The illegal parts are rarely punished and never on the level meted out to “murderers.” And that’s just one example.
It’s totally legal to deliberately kill innocent people, as long as you do it in certain ways.
Are people who smoked next to other people deliberately killing them? After all, second hand smoke was quite dangerous.
A factory boss decides to release some toxic pollutant. They know that it will result in some number of deaths over the next years. They choose to go through with it anyway, because they make more profit than if they disposed of the stuff properly, and that money matters more to them than the lives they’re ending.
What’s the difference between that and some petty criminal shooting someone in the street so they can take the victim’s wallet?
And yeah, smoking counts too, why not? The saving grace there is that the harm from an individual smoker isn’t very large. Even over a period of years, someone who habitually smokes near people who don’t consent to it only takes a tiny fraction of a life. That’s why I think smoking bans should be enforced with reasonable fines rather than life in prison.
Sure.
> A factory boss decides to release some toxic pollutant. They know that it will result in some number of deaths over the next years. They choose to go through with it anyway, because they make more profit than if they disposed of the stuff properly, and that money matters more to them than the lives they’re ending.
This depends a lot on context you haven't provided. Most importantly - is this legal?
If releasing this toxic pollutant is illegal, then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. For good reason, that is usually not a death sentence. But if you have an issue with how harsh or not the sentence is, that's a question to take up with the legal system, not with the individual.
Either way, vigilante justice is not needed.
If releasing this pollutant is legal, the question is different. Firstly, why is it legal? If it shouldn't be, then again - this is something to take up with the justice system. Sometimes it's legal for good reasons - it's not clear yet that it is truly toxic. That should definitely inform how we treat someone - releasing something that might be a pollutant is definitely different.
There's just a lot of nuance to this question, it's not an easy soundbite, because the real world is complicated.
> What’s the difference between that and some petty criminal shooting someone in the street so they can take the victim’s wallet?
Let me make a very important point here.
The legality of an action matters a lot more for society than the morality of an action. That's kind of the whole reason we have a legal system, and for good reason! And a pretty fundamental principle of the legal system is that intent matters a whole lot.
Here's some of the differences of the two cases:
- With a criminal shooting someone in the street to take their wallet, I am very scared that he will continue doing this - he will likely shoot more people to get their wallets, because he ignores the laws and morality.
As opposed to the factory boss, who (assuming this is legal), would presumably not do something if it were illegal. So I don't have to worry about his actions - he's not likely to "kill" anyone else if it's against the law.
- A criminal shooting someone is almost certainly trying to kill or at least harm them. The action is very direct. This matters a bunch, because we can be pretty certain of their intent, and therefore how they will act in the future.
As opposed to a factory boss - where the indirectness of the action is far more ambiguous. Did he really know that this would cause deaths? Are there mitigating circumstances (like him being pretty sure it's far enough that it won't cause deaths because it's small amounts, or far from populations)?
---
The biggest problem with your examples is that there are really two options here. You either agree with the legal system - in which case, there's a perfect remedy for actions like releasing toxic chemicals, which is using the legal system to prosecute such people.
Or you don't agree with the legal system - you think some things should be illegal, but they aren't.
And this is what is secretly (or not so secretly) motivating most of the pro-vigilante comments. They think that what they consider to be moral is good enough to use to enact justice - they don't need to actually convince their fellow citizens, or convince their lawmakers, to enact their ideas into law. It's enough for them to fervently be sure they are right - that's supposedly a good enough reason to inflict their morality on other people using violence.
And that is a disgusting, anti-democratic worldview, that would leave society in tatters.
Society can't function if everyone can just decide that their morality is the ultimate justice. We have to come together as a society and agree on rules. Because as everyone understands - 99% of people do something that someone else considers wrong.
If our society functioned via "well I'm sure I'm right about what is moral, so I can execute people based on my morality", then pretty soon we'd have total anarchy.
Do you think abortion is murder? Go ahead and kill some doctors. Do you think creating weapons should be illegal? Go ahead and kill the CEO of a weapons manufacturer. Do you think protesting war is terrible because it puts "our soldiers" in danger? Go and shoot up people leading protests. Perhaps you think that climate change will kill us and anyone who works in the car industry is therefore tainted? Go and blow up some car factory workers.
I agree with some of the position above, disagree with some others, as I'm sure most people do. And that's fine! But decent people understand that disagreeing about things, even things that directly pertain to life and death - is not a good enough reason to start killing each other over. We all have to live together, so we all have to work together to agree on what is right or wrong, and to appoint people to collectively enact the will of society - not just have individual citizens run off and do what they want based on their ideas.
Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law. The entire point of the person you are replying to is that acts with moral equivalence are treated differently by the law because of the social and economic status of those likely to commit those acts.
A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for charges of simple possession as well as charges of possession with intent to distribute. Both are effectively the same drug, but one version of this drug is more commonly use by poor and non-white people, and the other version used by rich white people, and so we ended up with a gross disparity in the law over exactly morally equivalent acts.
You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.
There are various ideas about morality. But I think even in the most common-sense interpretation of morality, most people agree that there are things that are legal, but immoral, things that are perfectly moral but illegal, and that respecting the law is a meta-rule that is important regardless of morality.
Simple example: Most people agree that cheating on a spouse is wrong and immoral. Not illegal though. Do you think it makes any sense to suggest that the only options are either we change the law to make adultery criminal, or we take vigilante justice on adulterers? Or is it just possible that some things might be immoral (to some people) but should be legal?
> A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines [...]
Yes, and I think the law was wrong in this case, like it's been wrong many times in history (slavery was once legal too). The correct thing to do was to try and change it, which is what eventually happened.
An incorrect option would've been to jailbreak prisoners because you disagree with the law, despite lots of people being imprisoned for longer than they should've been.
> You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.
I am engaging, because I disagree with this idea. The law and morality are connected, but distinct things, as I've shown above. We have to have legal systems in place to make broad decisions - we can't go based off of people's personal moral ideas. Explain to me how you would like things to work and still be compatible with that idea, given the above examples I've given.
And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.
The standard answers are things like, the law exists to protect people, or enforce broadly agreed conduct, or to deter or punish criminals.
Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.
Civilization depends on people mostly not taking violent revenge when wronged. The law exists to replace revenge with “justice” in the minds of the aggrieved. Everything else is window dressing.
If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.
I agree. I just don't think the system is as broken as you seem to think it is. Compared to almost any other place and time, the system is the best.
> Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.
Btw, while I do agree with this in a democracy, note that many, many people throughout history (and today!) live and have lived in places where some people really are above the law. That doesn't seem to preclude society functioning.
Here in Germany, I've never had to worry about whether my healthcare would pay my treatment when I've had to go to the hospital and had to be operated on. The idea that this is possible in other countries is unfathomable to me. I didn't choose to have whatever illness I might have. My doctor decided the best way to treat my illness. Why does some third party get to decide "but nah bro, it can't be that bad, let's just wait and see how the patient does in a week or two". Why can they override what a doctor thinks is best?
And why are there people like you who thinks "it's not that bad/broken".
That, however, is not what I was referring to - I was talking about the system of laws, of democracy, etc. That was what the discussion was about - whether it's "ok" to kill someone in a vigilante way, and whether the legal system or general system of Western countries works well in terms of aligning the law to what people think it should be.
I would say almost the entire body of social science and moral philosophy (setting aside the replication crisis for the moment) more or less proves the correctness of saying "nobody gives a shit what the law says". Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes. Without the law, we'd have more direct culture clashes around topics like immigration, because people try to bring their cultural values and social mores with them, the law encodes and enforces whatever social mores exist, as much as the people of a society can control its laws.
It's not the law people care about, it's the social mores. And the social mores extend from the collective consensus of morality. People don't generally kill other people, not because it's illegal, but because it's wrong. But sometimes, killing other people isn't wrong, such in the case of self-defense or protecting your family. Sometimes the law even convicts and punishes people for committing crimes, because the law has a narrower interpretation at the margins than wider social mores. This is exactly what you're observing here. There is a moral equivalence between murdering thousands of people via a bureaucratic decision and pulling the trigger on the gun, but the law treats them differently, society does not. /This/ is why so many people condone the shooter's actions.
You aren't getting it. The law does not matter. The law is a reflection of society, society is not a reflection of the law. The law is a tool of language to try to explain, communicate, and enforce something that exists outside of it, but the thing which gives law power is the thing which exists outside of it. Morals are way more important than laws.
For all situations that actually matter, nobody gives a shit what the law says, and they never will. They only care about what other people will think of them, what they will think of themselves, and how their moral compass and social mores guide their decision-making process. This is exactly why we generally think of people who murder as being sociopaths, lacking a moral compass, because it's the moral compass and not the law that prevents most people from being murderers.
You think I'm being flip, I'm actually making an incredibly cogent point that you continue to miss, just as you missed the point of the person you replied to originally.
I think it's a bad approach to assume that you're making incredible points and I'm just not getting it, rather than assuming we're just disagreeing and that, potentially, you are wrong.
> Society is bound by social mores, not by laws, laws are intended to encode social mores and give a vehicle to systematically enforce those mores without relying on vigilantes.
Maybe we're talking past one another by talking about whether the law "matters" or not.
Social mores are against adultery. Many people do in fact commit adultery, and continue to have totally fine lives, despite this.
On the other hand, lots of people hate taxes. Try not paying your taxes, and you'll end up in jail.
I don't think the law is a reflection of social mores - almost everyone agrees that the law, while obviously based on many in society, shouldn't encompass all social mores, and has to include things that are not, prima facie, moral. You shouldn't, in general, put someone in jail for being too poor to afford food, and stealing some food. Very few people agree that that's moral in a specific instance. But if you don't jail people for stealing, very soon society breaks down.
I'm not sure which of the above, if any, you disagree with. Maybe none of it - in which case maybe we just agree with each other and are using different language to explain ourselves. If you disagree with something in specific, maybe we should drill down on that.
You seem to be making the argument that the law has a life of its own, which isn't entirely untrue, but case in point: While most people don't enjoy paying taxes, they do so because they understand it's necessary to have a functioning society they want to be part of. There are many legal ways to get around paying most or all of your taxes, but they're generally so costly to setup that they're only available to the very rich and to corporations, and most people morally judge this as a negative thing even though it's legal, they don't generally morally judge paying their taxes as a negative thing, but the avoidance as negative.
We do disagree, and it's not a question of semantics, it's a question of causality. You are essentially saying that the law and social mores have no causality relationship, I am saying the law comes from social mores, and the law does not influence them. The law is /subordinate/, which is why nobody really cares about it. Obviously "nobody" is intentionally overbroad, policy-makers, lawyers, and judges care quite a lot about the law, but the vast majority of the population (99%+) does not, they do however care very very deeply about social mores and cultural norms.
There are a few related but different questions for a given sort of killing: is it legal? Is it just? If the first two answers are different, what should be done about it?
For the first two questions, the answers for regular lead poisoning are yes and no respectively, and for high-speed lead poisoning it’s no and no. I think this disparity is a serious problem.
Why do you think there is a disparity? Is it purely the product of democracy and the will of the people? If so, it seems like a hell of a coincidence that the legal killings are mostly the ones that rich and powerful people do.
I agree that it’s bad to take it into your own hands and kill people you think the law has failed to cover.
But it’s going to happen sometimes. In a healthy society it’s going to be universally condemned. This one wasn’t. What does it mean and what should we do about it?
Some segment of commenters seems to think that it means people are sick and should be shamed into condemning this killing like they’re supposed to.
I think that’s stupid. People are how they are. It’s more interesting and useful to look at why this particular killing gets so much support.
The failing in our society isn’t that too many people cheer on this killing. That’s a symptom. The problem is a system which treats people’s lives cheaply, which allows some people to kill in the name of profit, and not only fails to condemn them, but rewards them handsomely.
If you want people to work within the system, they need to believe that it’s worth doing. They mostly do, but cracks are showing. It would be wise to fix the problem before those cracks produce a total failure.
I think you're flipping the causality. It's not like society looked at all ways of killing people, said "well these ones are done by poor people and these by rich, let's decide what to do about things based on that". It's that rich people in general got that way by working within the system, doing legal things, etc. (Usually, but not always, with a lot of starting privilege that made it easier for them, or course.)
> Why do you think there is a disparity? Is it purely the product of democracy and the will of the people?
Mostly. I think the disparity is because shooting someone is a lot less ambiguous than doing things like using pollutants. I think you're refusing to acknowledge the nuance here.
But just to be clear - you think poisoning someone with lead is legal? Or releasing lead into places that would affect people is legal? Cause I'm pretty sure you're wrong on both counts. Lead is heavily regulated, and I'm fairly certain clear-cut cases of "I released a paint with lead in it" would be illegal.
> I agree that it’s bad to take it into your own hands and kill people you think the law has failed to cover.
> But it’s going to happen sometimes. In a healthy society it’s going to be universally condemned. This one wasn’t. What does it mean and what should we do about it?
Well I think you answered your own question - it shows that our society is unhealthy. That's why I'm spending my time arguing on an internet forum on why I think we should all condemn this kind of thing - I'm fighting for the ideals of a healthy society!
> Some segment of commenters seems to think that it means people are sick and should be shamed into condemning this killing like they’re supposed to.
> I think that’s stupid. People are how they are. It’s more interesting and useful to look at why this particular killing gets so much support.
Not at all stupid (I say, as someone doing this). I don't agree with this "people are people" idea. I believe in ideas, in debate, in persuasion. I believe we as a society are pretty lost if we can't come around such basic ideas as "murder is wrong and we should all condemn murderers".
And btw, I think despite the huge amount of noise we're all seeing about this, in absolute terms I think 95% people the population is firmly on the side of "murder is wrong", with a very large online contingent of people making it appear that there is some groundswell otherwise. I'm also trying to fight this perceived groundswell, if only by showing that the other side exists.
> The failing in our society isn’t that too many people cheer on this killing. That’s a symptom. The problem is a system which treats people’s lives cheaply, which allows some people to kill in the name of profit, and not only fails to condemn them, but rewards them handsomely.
I think this is just an utterly wrong view of society. We live in a golden age compared to any other society that has ever existed. People generally live longer, healthier lives by almost any actual statistic that measures such things. We have access to a vast wealth of almost anything we want, from experiences, to material goods, to entertainment - things that would've looked like miracles to a person at almost any other time in history.
And I think this idea that the system treats people's lives cheaply is absurd, frankly. There are specific problems, the system isn't perfect - but you can't objectively look at current (Western) society and not see that it's the pinnacle of human achievement - so far - by almost any objective measure.
That this translates into a populace that is somehow very upset with some vague "the system" is a problem, but I think you're misdiagnosing it as something actually being wrong with "the system", as opposed to being wrong with people's perceptions.
(Of course a lot of this hinges on what you mean by "the system" here - certainly every country has lots of specific problems that you could point out and I'd agree with. But I usually hear these complaints phrased very abstractly, without any concrete understanding of what specifically is wrong or what better "system" you are imagining. If you want to tell me what your answer is to either of these questions - I'd be very interested in hearing!)
There are plenty of circumstance where it’s legal to release lead into places where it would affect people. Sometimes outright not forbidden, and sometimes technically illegal but barely enforced. Examples of the former include leaded gasoline (still legal for some application) and coal power plants (they exhaust all sorts of nasty stuff, including lead). For the latter, consider Flint Michigan, or you can find random cases such as Smith Foundry where they exceeded limits for years and consequences were light.
I recognize that it’s a lot easier to draw a causal line for a gun than for pollution. I don’t think it should matter aside from the increased difficulty of proving guilt. I recognize that it does influence perceptions, but I don’t think it should.
Interesting thing about living longer, healthier lives than ever before. In the US, that leveled off about 15 years ago. Lately it has started getting worse. Health care costs continued to rise steadily. Insurance bureaucracy gets ever more onerous. And the wealthiest people in society continue to get vastly more wealthy.
You could say that people are still a lot better off than they were 50 years ago or whatever. And you’d be correct. But people really don’t like it when things get worse. They especially don’t like it when the pain isn’t shared by the upper crust.
Would you rather have a health care plan that provides quick, easy access to leeches, or a plan with a million forms, an annoying call tree, and opaque decision making, which gives you proper medicine 90% of the time and leeches 10% of the time? The second one is the objectively better option. But the people who offer that plan will probably be lynched. You can acknowledge that and work with it, or you can insist on treating people as rational and get absolutely nowhere.
“Murder is wrong” is a tautology. “Murder” means a killing that is wrong. (Either morally or legally depending on context.) The question isn’t whether murder is wrong. Everyone agrees on that. The question is which killings morally count as murder and which don’t. And don’t say “they all count!” Almost nobody actually believes that and you probably don’t either. People draw the line in different places but you can almost always find some circumstance where they’d say, yeah, that killing was acceptable. It’s a little surprising that a bunch of people think killing an insurance CEO is on the other side of the line, but it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a line.
Society is unhealthy. We agree on that. Why do you think it’s so? Is it just something that happens randomly, or is there an underlying reason?
So maybe society got it wrong. Maybe you're getting it wrong. Maybe they didn't fully understand things back then, maybe you don't fully understand the actual options society faced.
I'm not arguing that society always gets things right. I'm arguing that single-handedly deciding it got things right and therefore doing whatever you think is best is something society can't condone.
The greatest thing humanity understood over the last 500 years, however imperfectly, is the idea of being able to live side by side and not kill each other, even when you strongly disagree about things. Before that people were killing each other over differences in religious interpretations, differences in ideas, etc. People always disagree about things - but we learned to live together, and in democracies, learned how to work together to steer society to (hopefully) better places. You really want to unwind that?
This isn't hypothetical. I'm asking a direct question - what would you do with a father who, say, kills a doctor who performed an abortion on his daughter? From the father's point of view and ethics, the doctor literally murdered is grandchild. Do you cheer him on? Excuse him? I'm genuinely curious how you answer.
> Society is unhealthy. We agree on that. Why do you think it’s so? Is it just something that happens randomly, or is there an underlying reason?
I think the underlying reason is what I said about - that people are forgetting the fundamental idea of being a unified society, living together and even loving each other, without necessarily agreeing on everything. Even when the disagreements are profound, hurtful and run very deep. I think Western society has misplaced its sense of purpose and sense of being virtuous - so of course it's easy to slide into "well everything sucks, of course we should just ignore the law and do whatever we want".
I keep agreeing with that and you keep arguing it so this all seems like a complete waste of time.
(Except that I think it's not really "widespread approval", it's just a very vocal bubble that gets amplified online.)
do you? Are you open to be convinced of the opposite of your view on this issue?
> I think despite the huge amount of noise we're all seeing about this, in absolute terms I think 95% people the population is firmly on the side of "murder is wrong"
I think you are wrong. Society very often sides with the side that is perceived as the threatened person acting in self-defense even when they use violence.
Also we cannot rule out racism. If the killer wasn't white (then fit for the role of hero in the US), it would be all different.
Yes, always.
But I think it's a pretty high burden of proof to convince me that murder is OK, or that it should be celebrated.
> I think you are wrong. Society very often sides with the side that is perceived as the threatened person acting in self-defense even when they use violence.
I think very few people would consider killing someone in cold blood an actual act of self defense.
I could be wrong of course. Hard to tell how people genuinely feel without some kind of real survey.
> Also we cannot rule out racism. If the killer wasn't white (then fit for the role of hero in the US), it would be all different.
I'm not sure what you mean here, could you explain?
If legality is determined based on what's beneficial to the rich and powerful, then this is equivalent to saying "most importantly, does it benefit the rich and powerful?" which is, of course, the point of the person you're arguing with. So this is not the gotcha you think it is.
> vigilante justice is not needed.
This does not feel like a good faith argument. This is the exact same "but do they really need to protest about it?" argument made by everyone who wants to see the status quo preserved. You're saying that the status quo is intrinsically good and everything must be done within the legal system as it's set up. That gives no redress to the people for whom the legal system has been specifically designed to fuck over. Your argument completely falls apart if the legal system is not 100% foolproof, and I simply don't believe anyone could argue in good faith that it is foolproof.
I do not want to see vigilante justice. But I also recognize that if the legal system is not producing justice, people will find ways to bring about their own version of justice. This is a predictable consequence of a system that has been specifically designed to never hold anyone in power accountable for anything. The way to stop vigilante justice is to improve the legal system so that people do not feel that it is necessary.
I don't think it's true that legality is determined based only on what's beneficial to the rich and powerful.
In any case, if you think asking if something is legal before deciding whether it's ok to do it is some kind of gotcha, then you're throwing out the whole concept of law and order - of society. I'm not sure where you go from there.
> This does not feel like a good faith argument. [...] You're saying that the status quo is intrinsically good and everything must be done within the legal system as it's set up. That gives no redress to the people for whom the legal system has been specifically designed to fuck over. Your argument completely falls apart if the legal system is not 100% foolproof, and I simply don't believe anyone could argue in good faith that it is foolproof.
Wow, you're making a lot of assumptions there. I don't think the legal system is 100% foolproof, not at all, nor do I think it's intrinsically good. No sane person would argue that.
But there are a lot of ways to deal with that fact, a whole spectrum ranging from "doing nothing" through "trying to change the legal system" through to "just agree to ignore the legal system". You're arguing that if the system isn't perfect, we should skip right to ignoring it.
I'm arguing that we improve the system. Keep working on it, keep arguing and persuading and sometimes getting our way and sometimes not.
When did we get so jaded and decide things can't improve? Western civilization has gotten vastly better for most people, things that are considered moral absolutes today were not even considered in polite company less than 50 years ago (not to mention some things less than ten).
> But I also recognize that if the legal system is not producing justice, people will find ways to bring about their own version of justice. This is a predictable consequence of a system that has been specifically designed to never hold anyone in power accountable for anything. The way to stop vigilante justice is to improve the legal system so that people do not feel that it is necessary.
I strongly disagree with the idea that the legal system never holds anyone in power accountable, there are myriad counterexamples to that. And not as many actual examples of "the system" letting people be unaccountable.
And there's a gigantic difference between understanding that sometimes people want vigilante justice, and excusing it or cheering it on. Of course it's understandable. There are even more clear cases - family members of murder victims would totally understandably want to kill the people who murdered their loved ones. I would very much empathize if someone were to do that; I'd still condemn it as wrong. Wouldn't you?
Nor do I, but it sounds like I (and likely some of the others responding to you) think it leans a lot further in that direction than you do. That's a worthwhile discussion, but my point was that "the most important question is whether it's legal or not" feels out of place -- almost bad faith -- in a discussion about whether the legal system is working or not.
> When did we get so jaded and decide things can't improve?
When we saw the United States backslide into 1960s-era Jim Crow discourse, and even 1930s-era Totalitarianism discourse, that we thought we were over and done with.
> Western civilization has gotten vastly better for most people
Over what timeframe? "Western civilization" has gotten worse for almost everyone since the 1980s by many measures. We're drowning in multiple forms of debt. Wages have stagnated. Expected lifespan has plateaued or even declined. Racism and sexism seem to be on the rise. Medical issues can bankrupt even privileged rich kids. More people are in prison or homeless than the 1980s. The rich have much more societal power over the poor than they have since the gilded age. How far back do you expect us to go to maintain this positive outlook? Telling us it was much worse 90 years ago feels hollow when it was better 10 years ago, better than that 20 years ago, even better 30 years ago, and better still 40 years ago. The only thing that's significantly better is technology and science, especially medicine -- but most of us aren't really reaping the benefits of those improvements in medicine for risk of going bankrupt.
> I strongly disagree with the idea that the legal system never holds anyone in power accountable, there are myriad counterexamples to that
Are there myriad counterexamples? There are some salient ones like Elizabeth Holmes, SBF, and Bernie Madoff -- who all fucked over other rich people in addition to the poor. But there are many more counter-counterexamples: our incoming president was convicted of 34 felonies with no consequence and has openly stated he's going to pardon all his buddies for any level of corruption they might be guilty of. The Panama Papers, the Epstein files -- people aren't seeing anyone held accountable for these things. Meanwhile compare the response of the NYPD to the CEO's murder versus the murder of a black teenager in a poor neighborhood. What's the difference, really? Both are a private citizen being murdered. Why the different response? What's really different about those two people?
> law and order - of society ... If our society functioned via "well I'm sure I'm right about what is moral, so I can execute people based on my morality", then pretty soon we'd have total anarchy
A lot of your arguments have this feeling of "maintaining order in society is more important than individual justice or morality". That's a rather authoritative/totalitarian stance, which I don't say just to dismiss it -- it's a valid political viewpoint, and there arguably can be "good" kinds of totalitarianism. I think there are hypothetical societies where I would agree with you, and societies where I would strongly disagree. In the United States in 2024, I medium-disagree. "Maintaining order" usually just means "maintaining the status quo", so you have to actually look at the status quo. The status quo is that people are getting charged $291 for a 10-minute virtual followup consultation, $6000 for an ambulance ride, going bankrupt if they need major surgery, and sometimes just dying without treatment if they need major intervention but get denied by their health insurance. The status quo is that the rich can legally murder others stochastically if it increases their profits, and can even commit actual felonies without very much risk of consequence. The status quo is that few of our representatives are willing to challenge these systems, and those that do get ostracized, and even then their efforts are struck down by an openly corrupt supreme court. The status quo is that overwhelming waves of disinformation and rage-bait have made it impossible to "out-vote the ignorant" to enact any meaningful change in the system. The status quo is absolutely fucked for the vast majority of people. So no, in the United States in 2024, I don't think "maintaining order" -- preserving the current winners and losers in society -- is more important than individual justice and morality.
Law must reflect to some degree and scope, the morals of its culture or people. If this does not happen for enough time and affects enough people, then you see a regression to tribal or vigilante justice.
Law is a form of centrally managed punishments that strongly influence individuals to behave according to the local population's values, morals and ethics.
What if a small class of people with enough resources, wit and motivation can hack this system to their favor? How will the rest of the population react when they realize this had been going on for years? Will they be able to "patch the bug" in the code of law and stop the exploiters?
What happened with the CEO of a system that is antithetical to American values, culture and morals, is an individual workaround to a long running lethal bug ignored by the maintainers of the code of law. This was ignored because the maintainers are a cog in the machine of that small class.
I agree with law and democracy, but we may no longer have that since the bigger population has no agency to shape laws. We may just have some other unnamed system that on the surface looks like law and democracy, but under the hood seems to be an oligarchy.
I don't know why you are so eager to think people don't have agency or can't influence society. So many things change all the time. Just one example - twenty years ago most gay people lived in secret, because being out was a huge problem for society; the idea of gay marriage was ridiculously distant. Today, in most places, it's seen as a non-issue.
That didn't happen by chance. It happened because of the hard dedicated work of a lot of people, who convinced society to see things differently, and won.
And if anything this murder shows the extent of issue of the disconnect above.
That is a sign that people believe they can't obtain redress through widely available legal means.
If the state, courts and other systems don't get people justice or something you can squint at and call justice when they are wronged some fraction of those wronged will go outside the systems and seek to get even instead.
Public sympathy for the (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what gives the parts of the institutions that want to do what the people want the political capital to something other than the status quo.
I, and probably a lot of people reading this on HN, are outwardly very comfortable.
I have cash/assets that would be life changing for most people (especially when I read comments on reddit where people say that $10k would be life changing for them) - and a "good" white-collar job.
I'm also lucky enough to be old enough to have not been 100% screwed like our even younger generation has (I only got 90% screwed).
I've been very lucky in life, but when I see the level of wealth inequality and how corporations have completely captured our government, and our two-tiered justice system, it makes me feel sick and angry.
I still feel like I'm being held hostage by the 0.1%, under pressure to keep working to line other's pockets for much longer than I would otherwise have to, and like the whole thing could all come crashing down in a week's time given some improbable but far-from-impossible set of circumstances.
I also don't feel like I would be supported by my government, corporations, or society in general if those circumstances actually occurred.
So I definitely sympathize with the frustration of people who feel unsupported by society and unrepresented by government - especially those who happened to be unluckier in life than I.
And with the current state of affairs, there must be a LOT of them around.
I sympathize with that frustration a hell of a lot more than I sympathize for a dead CEO who made a career out of systematically denying treatment to people who paid him for coverage.
In fact, I'm happy he died as a reminder that nobody is untouchable, no matter how much lobbying your corporation has done to make social murder legal, and no matter how much you've tried to isolate yourself from the consequences of your terrible actions.
I read a reddit comment about the alleged shooter's arrest before:
"murder is such a strong word, can't we just call it removing a cancer?"
Side note - the "internet" is very likely a mix of bots and real humans nowadays. What might seem initially like a real person saying "hunt the snitch down" could very likely be a bot that is meant to sow and influence discord. That bot's followers could very likely be real people who then say "ya i agree with this account! get your pitchfork!"
----
I have a family member suffering from multiple exposures to fluoroquinolone (FQ) antibiotics. While the research doesn't understand the root-cause reason for how FQs cause trouble, my journey with dealing with my personal family-history of diabetes and my family's chronic illness has gotten me to go down a road of understanding how to solve some issues.
From what I understand, mitochondrial dysfunction appears to be at the core of many issues like I said. However, to expand on what I've found useful in my n=1-2 experiments, juxtaposed against much of the Phd/MD health podcast sphere information, most interventions like exercise and nutrition fundamentally are there to improve metabolic health. Many markers like VO2 Max or A1c are integral that gives a snapshot of one aspect of one's metabolic health.
In my family's and my specific journey, I've put together a variety of molecules/supplements we've found useful in their journey and framed it in such a way as to be actionable, but also presentable enough to the public.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo2F851i0OE4tIQb0hQ7...
It's a lot of information, but hopefully it would be useful for you and others. Feel free to ask any questions on my rationale, thinking, or reasoning behind why certain things are useful, and how I came to certain conclusions.
=D
For what it’s worth, I am also human. Hi.
We are long past that being a means of distinguishing a bot for anything other than obvious crypto scams. I have no doubt at all that a substantial number of HN posts, especially on divisive topics such as this one, are made by foreign agents. HN is an ideal means of targeting the types of people driving Western economies, and so I am certain that it is one of the top targets for such operations.
So it's not so much that there are no real people who want to hunt down the snitch, but that there's a very loud minority of performative extremists with an army of sock puppet accounts who want to hunt down the snitch.
The people running the bot armies for foreign influence operations probably do not care about hunting down the snitch, they are simply following orders to spread that message.
And one reason it's pent-up, as opposed to released, is due to corporations taking over our society and ruining human lives. All within the confines of the law and democracy. That's what this is about. There is no recourse or effective vehicle to be heard.
This is the part of the story that must be discussed more, lest there will be more killings like this one.
I take it as a reaction to the wider public feeling that the US medical system is broken and the appropriate channel to fix it (voting & politics) being broken too thanks to lobbying.
Under circumstances like this people’s perception shifts to a more relativistic perspective. A bit like perception of a rioter throwing a stone at riot police depends on whether the viewer agrees with the movements goals even if in isolation they wouldn’t normally approve of throwing rocks at people faces.
Basically, we’ve begun normalizing events that fit a timeline of domestic turmoil.
It's a real reminder of how little sympathy people can have about people who they consider the enemy or the "other". I'm almost certain nearly all of the people celebrating the murder believe that they're good people and believe in justice too. Humans are so flawed. And I'm not suggesting for a moment I'm above it. I've often noticed how I don't care as much as I should when someone I dislike is harmed or suffers injustice.
Once we start tacitly approving of extrajudicial killings, it doesn’t stop with just those you dislike or even just the outspoken figures. Consider how many completely innocent civilians died during the Troubles or the French Revolution, or how easy it would’ve been for someone completely innocent to get harmed here.
It’s easy to approve of this in a vacuum, it’s just a path full of extreme cognitive dissonance.
But the path to solving that has to involve adjustments to the system that address this mismatch, not just condemning the act or creating some huge diversion in the hope people will forget about it.
If that starts to break down, people in power need to wake up and fix it. The system does not, cannot, protect them from the masses entirely by force. I fear that they have forgotten.
I don’t think we should rejoice that justice has failed so miserably that people are applauding extrajudicial killings.
It’s a really, really, really bad thing.
I don’t think we should be so keen to embrace that.
I’m not keen to embrace it. But I think the finger-wagging is idiotic. Chastising people will accomplish nothing except for making them think you’re out of touch.
Folks disturbed by this outpouring of support for this murder should instead be asking why people feel that way. Maybe it’s because of a system that treats their lives as an expense to be minimized and gives them no recourse. If wide support for Luigi Mangione worries you, maybe look at fixing that.
Right now, Daniel Penny is being celebrated by half the country for killing Neely, and the other half wishes something like this would happen to him.
It’s especially bizarre here because I haven’t even expressed an opinion about the killing. All I said is that love of killers is nothing new, and if you want it to stop then you need to change the circumstances that make people like killing, rather than just telling them that they’re bad.
Considering the other side is a minority of top-level executives and media outlets, I wouldn't bank much on that.
People are going to celebrate killers regardless, as they always have, when the perpetrator shares the viewpoint of the majority. It happened with Jesus and Barabbas, it happened with Cromwell and Charles I, it happened with Louis XVI and the French revolutionaries.
In fact, I'm not surprised that Luigi has a bigger fanbase than the Trump shooter. The majority then were in awe of Trump, if not openly cheering him. Here, they're cheering Luigi, with some even insinuating that it was his plan to get caught (something which might as well be true).
The other side is often 50% of the country. Whatever controversial figures you like, near 50% of the country would gladly applause or at least quote Clarence Darrow if they were brutally murdered.
Something to keep in mind.
It should be noted that the context with Jesus and Barabbas is probably the failed Jewish revolt against Rome that led to the destruction of the temple in 70CE, with the gospel accounts looking to separate the emerging gentile Christian movement from the Jewish rebels.
Stated another way, the law's job is to act in accordance with right and wrong, not to define it.
Not a good state to be in.
Every person with a 401k probably owns UHC somewhere, and they expect it to increase every year. He is merely part of the system to help make that happen.
Try going into work tomorrow and saying “boss I think our VP’s initiatives are wrong and I’m going to take us in a different direction”.
The interesting question to me is where murder is justified in your ethics. You came in with absolutes, after defending him.
Yeah, we saw that defense at Nuremberg. Didn't work.
You’re also comparing an insurance CEO to nazi organizers. Reality check.
The serious point is that blaming individual moral character is not going to fix healthcare. We need systemic change.
> You’re also comparing an insurance CEO to nazi organizers. Reality check.
They're comparing an excuse. It would be the same correct comparison if it was about someone parking illegally. And accepting and enabling suffering and death of people for profit rather than out of fear of being shot isn't exactly better.
1. Wanting to determine blame, and assign good and bad morality labels.
2. wanting to make healthcare better.
1. is merely psychosocial. It’s ultimately to make you feel better by constructing a revenge justification narrative.
Murdering administrators does nothing to fix 2. They will just replace him with the next guy in line.
No matter how you construe it, he didn’t make healthcare bad and he is not empowered to fix it.
I mean, I can quite confidently state I've not received tens of millions of dollars for my role in denying medical care to millions of people.
> You’re also comparing an insurance CEO to nazi organizers. Reality check.
I'm saying "I'm just a little peon in the system!" isn't a good defense. Doubly so for C-suite level folks. This wasn't some call center drone following a script.
> The serious point is that blaming individual moral character is not going to fix healthcare. We need systemic change.
Systemic change often requires individual people to be ashamed of the current setup.
> I'm just a little peon in the system!" isn't a good defense.
I agree. It’s not a good way to morally justify to yourself why you killed someone.
I think if the system keeps refusing to change something breaks. We just saw that in Syria. I think people are unsympathetic in this case because health insurers have already broken the social compact they’re supposed to operate within.
Who is saying that? I’m advocating for the change that will fix the system. Not the one that gives warm fuzzy feelings from righteous bloodlust.
If this murder doesn't change anything, was it justified? I just don't know.
It’s not that there. Is a lack of sympathy, it’s overwhelmed by the feeling of justice. And not the injustice you think occurred.
The killing of Bin Laden and Soleimani were justified, in my opinion, as declared enemy combatants and leaders of hostile State and non-State military forces. They didn’t “deserve” to die for justice. They were taken off the battlefield. Whether I agree with that decision or not, I understand the justification.
Killing a rapist and murderer via the death penalty is wrong, in my opinion. It is killing in cold blood as a punishment, not to protect others or prevent harm. I do not think government should engage in retributive killing. But that is just me.
As for the United CEO, I don’t think he deserved to die or earned a death. I do think that a compelling argument can be made that government institutions have failed to act to protect human life at the hands of the American healthcare system, and that an individual could see his killing as a justified means to force change and protect American lives. It is the eternal question of when is someone a terrorist and when are they a freedom fighter?
However, in civil law, for the state to kill someone it has to be done through the courts. There is evidence given on each side. Killing someone without this is not justice.
People talk as if it is so obvious UHC CEO was responsible for the deaths of many people but he never got to make his case. That's not justice at all.
Is it just a child rapist, who there is video evidence commuting the crime, gets to walk free because they can’t find the victim to testify in court? And yes, that is the law in some countries. The uk had to wait for someone to come back to the uk because they could convict without the victims but the country he committed the crime couldn’t.
And it’s only not obvious that he‘s responsible for a lot of pain and suffering when you ignore the facts. The accused doesn’t need to give their side of the story for people to know what happened.
There is always a defense in court. This is not necessarily the defendant explicitly testifying. That's what I meant by the defendant making their case.
Justice can fail in the courts, I agree. But you can't have justice without (a) an authority with the power to judge, usually the state, and (b) a court proceeding where evidence is weighed.
If you say the UHC CEO killing was justice, then you must, to be consistent, allow for other such killings. Should all healthcare CEOs now be knocked off?
Also, on the death penalty, I don’t think it’s ever gone to a vote where the people decided. So saying most people are againist the death penalty sounds hollow.
Same with everyone else the US has killed by drone.
Sentenced by a court to die, given the rule of law, is OK.
(note my personal belief is that the death penalty is wrong. today, it is legal).
It's because they believe in justice that they are celebrating the murder.
Because we can't trust everyone to deal out their own idea of justice without it turning into endless blood feuds and partisan killings. Not to mention all the lynchings and witch hunts. This doesn't even bring up the fact that most individuals don't have the resources or motivation to carry out a proper independent investigation. So then the wrong person gets hung by an angry mob, or beat to death by a family member of the victim.
But in any case he was working for United since 2004, according to Wikipedia.
I (obviously) don’t support vigilante justice, and felt somewhat sad when Hussein and Gadaffi were hanged/lynched because despite their evil, I’d rather we don’t treat human beings like that.
But I don’t think it’s hyperbole to consider the actions of this CEO and his company in the same breath as such evil tyrants; and as such, I can understand why many might be happy about what took place, especially if they had personal animus with the company.
But it is. Tyrants round up women and children and execute them. Healthcare is more complicated because you have multiple causes at play: the health conditions of patients, the hospitals and what they bill, and the insurance companies.
Money is a big factor here. People talk as if insurance companies should spend unlimited resources on every person. I understand the resentment over wealth inequality, but someone recently calculated that the top 4 billionaires could only support healthcare for everyone for 3 months. Money is not an infinite resource. Rationing is unavoidable.
But I get that there is a problem. Automatic denials and denials over treatments that have clear and significant benefits are a problem, absolutely. And the system could run more efficiently. But we also can't avoid death due to old age or sickness. Nor painless death.
But we can avoid murdering people in the streets in cold blood.
https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/unitedhealthcare-used-...
There is no reason why you need middlemen between the people and healthcare, beyond enriching the rent-seeking middlemen.
That's just a difference in methods.
> People talk as if insurance companies should spend unlimited resources on every person.
You're right that US healthcare is a total mess (that's a much bigger area for discussion) but that doesn't mean that it's therefore okay for insurance companies to deliberately trade people for profits. That's literally what they do. Seriously, they could choose to make less profit, or pay lower salaries, and treat patients proportionally better. (And of course, as we all know from the reporting in the past week, UnitedHealth is the worst of all in the US for treatment denials.)
> But we can avoid murdering people in the streets in cold blood.
I totally agree; but that wasn't the argument I was making.
There doesn't seem to be many release valves other than "accept your fate" especially when you have seemingly little control over your own fate.
One doesn't need to be a politician to do this, but just as an example Obama was able to do this to make some improvements to the US healthcare situation.
Unfortunately, the people most affected by these problems are probably not in a position to acquire the knowledge and skills to lead the entire field to a better solution like this.
It makes for a good story. We’ve all seen that movie 100 times.
I wonder if the shooter will survive long enough to make it to jury trial. That’s when the real circus will begin.
(All I know about this story is that United Health has one of the highest incorrect claim rejection rates in the industry. I know nothing about the CEO, but we’re way past 140 characters at this point, so these things don’t matter to social media.)
Did you mean tipping point?
What is the euphemism I'm actually looking for? Knife edge? No.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371412
It's everywhere. You're simply wrong. Sort by date, sort by score, look on any broader news story and check out the comments. They're not "extreme", either. Even if their content was, which it isn't, it still wouldn't be extreme by definition at this point.
This only holds for opinions. If someone posts a link to a survey that says out of a representative sample of Americans, 70% of them support abortion or whatever, you should believe that (assuming there are no issues with the organization conducting the survey). Same with other forms of argumentation. You shouldn't distrust the top answer on stackoverflow just because it's from 1% of the population, although you probably not think the average person is some sort of expert on every programming question either.
The problems with US healthcare boil down to there being more demand for healthcare than supply, and a fat bureaucracy sprouting up to partition that limited healthcare, often screwing over people who need exceptionally special care or who can't afford insurance in the first place. Who is to blame? You could reasonably apply some blame to the shortage of doctors created by the AMA, the FDA's guidance and the sugar industry's lobbying resulting in people being less healthy, lack of consumer protection laws around opaque medical pricing/gouging, and private insurance.
Would changing any one of these alone fix healthcare in the US? Maybe the first 2, if given a long time to materialize. But do any of these people deserve to die? It says a lot about you if you automatically dehumanize these people and say yes.
One of the reasons that many people voted for Trump, is nihilism. The real belief that Trump is the one most likely to burn the ‘system’ to the ground. That is the brightest hope some voters have.
And please understand that virtually no one wants to leave a burned-out wreckage on a desolate hellscape. Everyone fancies themselves Shiva, or a phoenix, or whatever cultural imagery makes sense to you.
The sadder truth is, that I say what I say - AFTER having already applied your advice. I have spoken to strangers, reached out to see what they think. I spend the time to understand the many subcultures people are not parts of.
Go look at what is showing up in streamer feeds.
Talk to people, and when a 20 year old tells you “yeah bitcoin is great, because I have no hopes. So even if it goes to the shitter, how much worse can I be.”, you will see that people are truly happy to see things go to hell.
I do wish I had seen other things and had different interactions. But there is a substantial level of nihilism.
If you wish not to believe me - we’re in a thread where an insurance CEO was assassinated and the perpetrator is being hailed as a hero.
People are hailing the shooter because of the resulting society they want to grow out of this, not because of some shallow death-drive diagnosis by an aspiring armchair psychologist.
Why do you have a strangle hold on meaning, and not what people themselves are saying ?
You seem to be rejecting observed reality, while accusing me of not listening.
Perhaps your objection isn’t clear?
What "observed reality" are you even referring to? In the end all we're doing is speculative mass-psychoanalysis. Something tells me you don't quite know what you're even saying...
Now, you might be surprised but America also has problems under the surface. America likes to project the good impression, but certain problems exist, aren't addressed enough for some time, got accumulated and it's harder to gloss them over. And since those problems are decades old, you have some parts of generations quite familiar with them. And we have Trump - first winning in 2016 and then even more triumphantly winning in 2024 - and those "normal", "good" sort of decidedly lost this November to those who's combined message might well be "things aren't well". Maybe we need to look at what's normal, as in if we have that state? Should we consider normal something only 40% think? 50%? 70%? That is, if 30% have long running reasons to think things aren't normal - is it enough for you to pause?
To the melting pot. What would you think if, looking into the pot, at the extreme you'd see the whole pot is full of that pent up anger, and nothing - or almost nothing - of what's "normal" here? Do numbers matter here? And, if they are suddenly too large, what you're going to do with lots and lots of those who'd think, figuratively, that lynching is still a good idea? Or in other somewhat known words, what would you do the good from, if the only thing you can do that is from evil?
The post-industrial US dipped as low as ~1300 or ~1650 Europe, but is now back to levels Europe only reached in 1750, well on track to repeating the rising inequality during industrialization. Sweden is still at 1280/1600 Europe numbers, better than 1960s USA.
Actually it probably has risen a bit more since then since those are 2010 numbers, hence the comparison of US numbers to the French Revolution
1: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/top-rich-europe-long-run-hist...
2: https://www.blogscapitalbolsa.com/media/images/69b536a604624...
One of the victims of war is Capital. Much Capital is destroyed in some places, and countries generally begin to do things that look an awful like command economics (i.e. Your factory is a tank factory now, you will make tanks, we will tell you how much you are getting paid. If you resist we will use the propaganda machine to make you look like our enemy). During both world wars the returns on capital were well below the rate of growth, and what would otherwise be expected.
On top of all that, the world wars were huge events for income taxes. If you look at a history of income taxes in the US, you see three local maxima for the top brackets. The Civil War, and the two world wars. The same is true of estate taxes in the UK, for example.
Both pension systems and labor unions were first created in the late 1880s/1890s and got a lot of steam in the early 1900s. Similarly with the modern iteration of minimum wages. Both the Nordic Model and Rhein Capitalism were created in the 1930s. On the more extreme spectrum, the Russian Revolution brought communism to Russia in 1917.
In a way you can see this as the fruits of the critique of capitalism by Marx in the 1840s. They grew and took root in light of rising unsustainable inequality and lead to mostly positive reforms that brought down inequality even in societies that retained capitalism at the core. Then the trend reverses as the US starts their war on Socialism and Communism, and Reganomics and Thatcherism become dominant.
If the unionizing and minimum wage movement was the cause of the big drop, wouldn't the drop have started before 1910?
After the Great Depresson and the second world war, most capitalist countries put brakes on those feedback loops in order to keep the whole system functional, especially in view of the apparent success of a socialist alternative. But those brakes have been in the process of being gradually stripped away since the 1970s, and even faster since the failure of the Soviet Union.
Seeing how the wealth gap is increasing between them and the US, most politicians and wealthy individuals are doing all they can to remove those brakes, pushing evermore to follow the US. Defund, privatize, deregulate.
Technically not in socialist soviet union for example. (But de facto the top party members did control way more wealth than common people.)
Can we look at the graph of wealth disparity of America versus other nations?
Rational economic actors who produce goods and/or services will tend to supply what there is the most economic demand for (what brings them the most profit). If half the population has almost none of the money, then their needs have little economic demand behind them. So then what is the economic incentive to supply them with the things they need?
In other words, producing a hundred-million-dollar yacht is a hundred million dollars (less profit margin) that could have been invested toward a more collective good, thus increasing the supply of those goods, thus reducing their scarcity, thus reducing their price.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/12/19/global-in...
Nevertheless, distributed power certainly is less dangerous than concentrated power, isn't it? Inequality is a metric of the overall concentration of such power in our free market society. More inequality means more power in the hands of fewer. They become more like kings each day, when does it stop?
Most of those countries aren't exactly paragons of political stability, but they're probably not going to undergo a french revolution any time soon.
While the sentence is likely true, the sister statement to it would cover historical relativism.
Society is generally expected to evolve and improve - this being the whole point of it.
So being absolutely better than the past is not as relevant to the conversation as how poor people are with comparison to their peers in their own country.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a world where everyone has everything they need and one person has a net worth of a gazillion dollars.
People like to point at a gap (in attainment or wealth or whatever) and pretend that this is all they really need to do, because the gap itself is evil. But that is nonsense, as demonstrated by my hypothetical. The gap itself is nothing and the context is everything.
So you can't just point out gaps. You need to articulate 1. what the people at the bottom are lacking 2. how closing the gap will ensure that the people at the bottom are better off afterwards (rather than just cutting down the people at the top).
it's not exactly comparing apples to apples. working class americans have access to material goods but they don't have generational wealth like the aristocrats did. they don't have political power. they have to work everyday. they don't benefit from the class privilege. pretty significant list of all the differences.
What we do have is food, clean water, climate controlled housing, and sanitation - all better than the richest royalty of the time.
In revolutionary France one particular cold snap without enough logs on the fire could kill your children.
Our actual quality of life in the day to day far surpasses the aristocracy of revolutionary France.
You don't rebel because someone has a nicer car than you, you rebel because you're starving and miserable. We're just not. We're comfortable and mildly annoyed someone else is more comfortable.
> You don't rebel because someone has a nicer car than you, you rebel because you're starving and miserable. We're just not. We're comfortable and mildly annoyed someone else is more comfortable.
very easy to say from our tech worker point of view!
A tiny group of people have an enormous amount of power over the rest of us. I still call that a big problem even if we have food and material goods.
>and the majority that do suffer addiction or mental illness.
This is also a problem, and a great example of something we could easily fix if power was not concentrated in the hands of a tiny few.
Excerpts from his review:
"It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out."
"He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/luigi-mang...
People see what they want to I suppose.
Ted K made virtually no reference to Ellul in his manifesto either. In either case, both were quite sane. Ted's manifesto is not a philosophical analysis of technology like Ellul or Skrbina. Ted's manifesto is a practical treatise agains technology and its primary thesis is that technological society must be destroyed.
I don't regard him as a philosopher but rather an agitator, not unlike Thomas Paine or (insert your preferred historical figure here). This largely because his writing is not in a spirit of inquiry over where technology might go, rather it is conclusory - industrialism is path-dependent and net negative, with the only open questions being how to undermine it effectively.
He's no different than the many, many cranks writing ill-informed manifestos online.
A book with similar sentiment that is more approachable is Neil Postman’s Technopoly.
I think it has been long enough to say that the bombings were not productive.
>I think it has been long enough to say that the bombings were not productive.
We can revisit this conversation in another 30 years if you wish.
Im not a Kaczynski scholar, so maybe it is possible to embrace the philosophy and come to sperate conclusions, but that is rarely the case for manifestos. They usually make strong positive claims about the necessity and justification of the author's actions.
2) There is a contraction in saying the manifesto has nothing to do with the killings, while its pulication is the primary motivation for the killings.
3) Kaczynski started bombing in 78 and mailed the manifesto to the news in 95. Kaczynski has similar essays before bombing, but at no time between 78 and 95 tried to leverage killings for exposure.
There can exist a corpus of ideas, and there can be actions people take due to their beliefs in those ideas, but if those actions don't particularly have much to do with the actual ideas, we can say one doesn't have much to do with the other. I'd give the New Testament as another example where the idea corpus and actions taken in its name tend to diverge.
The claim "The Unabomber manifesto had nothing to do with bombs" is one of fact and easily refuted by history.
In a parallel universe, someone else could have penned similar ideas and not conducted the bombings. In this universe, the bombings were entirely motivated by the ideas stated in the manifesto.
I think the reason this discussion is frequently had, is that people will read the manifesto, recognize that it discusses some interesting issues in a self-consistent way, and want to discuss those ideas without simultaneously heading off semi-veiled accusations of "are you going to blow stuff up now too?".
In fact, I would argue that considering that the Unabomber manifesto has been inspiration to at least two very intelligent people as they commit targeted murder against strangers, there is something interesting and unusual about that corpus of ideas compared to other writings by other figures.
I'm unaware of any highly educated people who have become similarly radicalized after reading Mein Kampf. Something is uniquely appealing about Kaczynski's writings.
I agree that there's a distinction between having an outside opinion about the direction of society, and becoming a terrorist.
It ultimately comes down to if someone truly believes that the ends justify the means.
In my opinion, deontological morality is primarily what prevents terrorism, followed by individual humility and acceptance of fallibility.
Unfortunately, I think utilitarianism and consequentialism are currently in Ascension in the USA.
And your takeaway is, for me, infantile, naive and dangerous. This guys is not a victim of a system, this guy is a killer, whether we like that CEO or not.
For the majority? Come on, if you guys don't like private healthcare (and why would you?) then there's a democratic process you can follow to change it. Encouraging executions on the streets might feel good, but it's not going to achieve anything, even if you think it's justified.
There's a lot of things that can be justified for the good of society (when in Rome and all that), but I just firmly think this isn't one of them.
Pretty much. Look up "citizens united". It turned USA into an oligarchy. Billionaires are allowed to buy elections, and politicians are beholden to the billionaires.
It's the reality of modern campaigning. People don't give candidates millions of dollars because they like the cut of their suit. They expect reciprocity.
Just because corporate media is supported by big business doesn't translate to the actual politicians being pro-corporations.
Especially when ironically enough big donors towards democrats are almost all ultra-progressive socialist types.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sa...
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/04/politics/bernie-sanders-2016-...
Superdelegates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate
"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."
- Boss Tweed
https://calgara.github.io/PolS5310_Spring2021/Broockman%20&%...
You're talking about national elections, and even then the people will vote for whichever candidate that gets the most votes by the delegates (as Bernie and Trump showed with Trump winning the nomination 3x times, while Bernie got good numbers despite having been seen as an relatively unknown person).
Even in your articles there was never any clear evidence of DNC top officials actively going about directing CNN/NBC to attack Bernie, having email leaks showing the DNC not liking Bernie and thinking of ways they could potentially push against his campaign is not the same as actively doing it.
This of course is fair if you believe we should have the low bar of seeing an offhand comment as incriminating evidence (i.e. if you and I talk about someone we hope could just fall off and die and it turns out they fall off and die - we would be accused for causing said death).
As an example from your second link (https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/04/politics/bernie-sanders-2...):
> Sanders ran strong and beat Clinton in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, parts of the Democratic wall she would go on to lose in November.
>He trounced her among young Democratic voters, who did not show up for her the same way they did for Obama.
>None of this is to say that Democrats shouldn’t have treated the process differently, but it doesn’t change the fact Clinton dominated the process from start to end. Or that Sanders, surprised by his own success, didn’t have the infrastructure to win a long campaign.
>There’s also the simple fact that Sanders ran in the primary of a party to which he was proudly not technically a member.
>Sanders ran a strong race, to be sure, and surprised every Democrat in the country. That’s beyond doubt. But so is the fact that, despite her flaws, Clinton didn’t need the DNC to win the nomination.
You can critic the superdelegate system 100%, you can critic the DNC's not being neutral, but your claim is that they actively worked against him, despite your links not providing this crucial evidence for such an accusation & the CNN conclusion seems to highlight more that it's likely due to Sanders just not having the infrastructure and long-term cred that Clinton had.
I wonder why she resigned right before the convention.
>Big donors in the democratic party overwhelmingly support ultra-progressive policies:
Here's a list of DNC top donors.
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties/DPC/2024/contr...
You can believe what you want.
When there's a scandal you tend to try and ensure at the very least to distance yourself from those who caused the scandal, hence why she left "right before the convention", I just do not understand why you want to die on this hill that there's a grand conspiracy to keep bernie from winning the 2016 DNC nomination.
>Here's a list of DNC top donors.
>https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties/DPC/2024/contr...
>You can believe what you want.
These are corporate donations, which btw Democrats gets more and yet have been pushing for more anti-trust cases and been the most pro-union government in almost 20 years and this is the smoking gun of "corporate shills in the Democrats!"?
And again I bet you didn't read my link did you? When you look at rich partisan donors which has way more direct influence than corporate donors, it does sync up with what the democrats have been pushing for (ultra progressive social issues).
I'm not dying on any hill, especially for the farce that is modern politics. They are all corrupt, both parties. I typically support whomever is in office because I want to country to succeed, and they've all disappointed me.
I'm sorry you can't see it, just keep that in the back of your head when you consume political news. Try to watch both sides, it might become clearer. Keep in mind, each news source has a favorite and they typically won't report on the bad things their favorite does, you have to find that elsewhere. It's like having a defendant with no prosecutor and vice versa.
>These are corporate donations, which btw Democrats gets more and yet have been pushing for more anti-trust cases and
Their remedy for Google is to have them divest Chrome? That's not meaningful at all. How many mergers have they allowed in the last 20 years? Mergers are by nature anti-competitive. They just allowed Activision-Blizzard merger that cost 1900 jobs so far. This is what donations from Google buys, a slap on the wrist by still allowing the Democrats to look like they actually did something; spoiler, they didn't. This also pretty much ensures Google won't face any other anti-trust legislation, at least from the Democrats, probably in my lifetime. Pat on the back, job well done.
Thinking about it, this is the exact same remedy they wanted for Microsoft in the late 90s. That is just for show and no real anti-monopoly remedy. We need real breakups like AT&T in the mid 80s. Something that restores competition and jobs. You won't find any of that from today's Democrats.
Remember when the Obama administration bailed out the banks but let everyone else in trouble lose their house and a deep discount? I sure do.
>been the most pro-union government in almost 20 years and this is the smoking gun of "corporate shills in the Democrats!"?
They have done almost nothing legislatively to reverse the damage the GOP has done to unions. They also support neoliberal economic theory and globalization, just like the GOP. Talk about killing jobs. NAFTA was pitched to the public supported by Clinton/Gore. Ross Perot, of all people was the lone objector in the 1992 race, stating "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fi8OOAKuGQ
Today's Democrats are all talk and no action because the public buys that and they don't risk their donor's affection. We used to call this "lip service." Keep believing they are actually doing something; and that's what they will keep doing: nothing but lip service.
In his later writing like Anti-tech Revolution he advocated for strategic actions that would make a return to a pre-technological society (apparently 18th century pastoralism or something similar) inevitable, but sort of threw up his hands over figuring how to meet that criterion.
Context for the confused: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_444
It was a sawmill!
When I saw the documentary about him, I remember thinking that he went to such extremes to get away from people, living without power or water, absolutely in the middle of nowhere, only to have his peace shattered by the reopening of some stupid sawmill.
I feel a bit like Ted when my stupid neighbors decide to use their leafblower many times each week.
God forbid anyone should have any peace. Oh my god, a leaf!! I must blow it somewhere else at once!!
Peace comes from within
If everyone made that amount of noise, the area we live in would be completely unbearable.
I wouldn't complain if he only used his stupidly loud blower when some leaves had built up, or used a rake for the three leaves he's blowing every time.
Or picked them up by hand. Or any of a number of different options that don't ruin the environment for everyone within 100m. But no.
Personally, I believe that ruining the environment should have a cost attached. But it unfortunately doesn't, so selfish dickheads gonna dickhead and ruin the environment for everyone.
Let me guess, a leaf blowing aficionado? Giant truck with big manly exhaust driver? Muh rights?
You're being really hostile and assuming the worst of me. You know nothing about me.
I'm just saying that you _might_ be the problem here. I'm not saying that others don't need to be more considerate, but that you only have control over yourself and your reaction.
What difference does it make? Doesn't your peace come from within?
I'll explain why:
>Why do you have a greater right to peace than your neighbors do a right to clean?
I think this was quite a rude statement, somehow even more rude because it was posed in a weak, backhanded way as a question.
It is also a question with the embedded presupposition that I actually do think I have a "greater" right to peace than my neighbors do a right to clean. "Assuming the worst of me".
This presupposition is also irrelevant because moving leaves is not inherently an operation that generates large amounts of noise.
I simultaneously believe my neighbor has a right to clean and also that I have a right to peace. These beliefs are not mutually exclusive and also not measurable so cannot be directly compared.
Notably however, my cleaning does not disturb my neighbors peace.
You don't know me or my situation except what I've stated, which was that I am living next to someone using a leafblower many times per week.
My strongly-held opinion is that there's no legitimate reason to use a leafblower many times a week in a highly-populated area unless you're being a selfish asshole. I think it was pretty clear that I would hold that opinion.
Do you disagree? I don't know because you haven't stated a position, only insultingly and weakly implied what you think my reaction should be (which is: no reaction, lobotomized and happy, everything is ok because I am non-reactive).
If you disagree, then I know where we stand and consequently what I think of your advice.
But your armchair psychology ("what do you think?") I found insulting.
>You know nothing about me.
I know something.
I know that your response to someone being disturbed by a neighbor using a leafblower many times per week was to imply (once again, in a weak backhanded non-committal way) that that person is being unreasonable to think that was excessive, and to offer a pithy one sentence non-solution to the problem.
A "solution" that is basically just me ignoring the fact my own home environment is being ruined by an asshole so I can't enjoy music, read a book or do basically whatever activity I would like to quietly enjoy.
Once again, in my own home, disturbing nobody.
>I'm just saying that you _might_ be the problem here.
Sitting quietly in your own home _might_ be a problem. I mean, what is there to be said about this? Do you want to step back and reflect on how this sounds?
Thanks for your concern. I'm comfortable with thinking my neighbor is an asshole. I don't love the situation, but that's my burden. I don't see any way around that without extreme action.
My original post was an impotent shout into the void, in the vain hope that maybe someone somewhere might be influenced to not be such a noisy asshole. Maybe my neighbor is reading!
>Peace comes from within
I find this pithy response to minimize the legitimacy of my concerns, and also insulting, as if I wouldn't have thought to ignore the noise without this insight.
Do you honestly think I wouldn't have thought to ignore the noise? I haven't tried? Do you actually believe you were offering any useful advice here?
If I didn't care about enjoying quiet activities in my life, and also somehow hadn't managed to discover this insight myself, then your pithy response might be helpful.
Unfortunately for me, I do value my own quiet activities.
And I don't actually see a way to simultaneously enjoy peaceful quiet activities, while also tolerating extremely loud annoying noise. And let's be honest, it's extremely loud annoying noise. Do you disagree?
If you don't have a solution to that conundrum, then perhaps it's best that you don't offer advice.
Sometimes people are assholes and there isn't a solution. I realize that. Unfortunately I'm not capable of being happy about it, as I am not comatose and my peace, the quiet enjoyment that I am supposedly entitled to inside my own home, is unfortunately somewhat dependent on external factors.
So, I'm unhappy about it, and telling me that I'm the problem because I'm not trying harder to ignore that unhappiness doesn't help.
There are a lot of problems with the healthcare system, but it's reductive to point at this one guy and say "you're evil".
For what? The insurance company has to put some guardrails on unnecessary treatments or else the rates for everyone go up even further.
I don’t want to be pooled with a hypochondriac that hits up 30 specialists in a year.
That's a sensible procedural rule for courts to follow, but I'm not a court. I have no legal or moral responsibility to presume someone is innocent. I exercise my own judgement on the matter.
I agree we don't want vigilante executions in nyc to become more normal than they already are. But don't get it twisted and think that means we are obligated to believe, or act as if we believe, that someone is innocent.
As long as you don't impede their freedom to live their own life. We have laws that prevent you from harming other people. Not only you cannot murder them but there are also laws around stalking, defamation etc.
Nobody is forcing us to like the people who we think are terrible human beings.
It's baffling to me that people are calling this a righteous cleanse when it was purely the murder of an innocent man with a family.
I think all of these things can be true. It is possible for one person to be ambivalent about the killing of a bad man, acknowledge that he had a family and that is unfortunate, and accept that the system is flawed and that systematic change is required to materially improve things.
I agree it's fair to criticize executives who are responsible for suffering.
But I also think we have to be very careful with the messaging about that.
Because I don't want to live in a society where we think that violence is an acceptable solution to injustice.
It doesn't lead to a good place.
Yes, sometimes it's necessary. But very very very rarely.
Personally, I'm with you. I absolutely don't want justice delivered via a mob or a vigilante without due process or the other protections that a fair justice system is supposed to provide us with.
This is why it's so important that congress, police, prosecutors, judges, and even juries do their jobs. If the people have no legal, accessible, and effective means to get justice they might resort to illegal means to get it. The longer people are denied justice, the more likely it is they'll take it into their own hands.
This election cycle nobody quite focused on healthcare; more abstract culture wars were in focus instead.
You can't blame that on congress and on judges etc. The whole society is responsible. The way we talk (or not talk) to our relatives and neighbors has profound effects on the society you'll live in
You don't want police to apply excessive force. You won't want innocent bystanders to be shot by the police. You don't want the police to hurt people just because they think they may be guilty, etc. Those things do happen and when they happen people get upset and rightfully so.
Anyway, it’s the State’s and regulations fault, as usual.
Understanding that the role of a CEO is essentially a replaceable cog in a vast and complex machine is beyond the capabilities of most people’s good-bad moral system, and so it’s easier to scapegoat one guy instead of looking at the deeper structure.
We spawned an emergent disembodied super-human organism called "society" that lives through the action of individual humans like an ant colony lives through the actions of individual ants.
But yet we have the strong need to put a human face on it. We need to attribute agency to something that has behaviour.
In order to explain phenomena like thunder, earthquakes etc, humans throughout history have often felt it much easier to imagine some "person in the sky" being the cause of it.
The same mechanism powers many conspiracy theories. "Global financial system that's hard to understand? Nah, it's just the Rothschilds".
Now, in some cases like CEOs of companies that do harm, it's harder to dismiss the individual responsibility, because there is a freedom of choice that the individual could do.
It's easier thus to pin the blame on that single cog rather than blaming the whole society for not voting the right people who would fix the problem at the root.
But ultimately, if that one cog would refuse to do harm then another person would take their place until the rules of the game would be patched to prevent that.
Punishing culpable people is effective only inasmuch it deters from the unwanted behaviour.
Letting people administer "justice" via violence is not conducive to a just and peaceful society. The side effects of letting that happen will backfire and will undo any "justice" improvements you may seek to achieve.
I think we all can personally loathe big bad CEOs and still think that murdering them is the wrong thing you do no matter what your moral theory is.
It's possible this CEO was fighting to reduce claim denial rates but was squeezed or cutoff from his legal team in every attempt. It's also possible he pushed to deny as often as possible. But until we have evidence, it seems a bit wild to attribute "willingness to work in an influential role at a company massively disliked" with complicity in crimes against humanity. And as you point out, it is never acceptable to use violence offensively against such a person, even if he was foaming at the mouth to hit the deny button daily.
10M is my number but I'm sure all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires on here would be shocked by such a low number.
Anything over that and I'd be quite happy to see them "adjusted" and all the cogs replaced.
Imagine if you were in a tribe of 100 and 1 person thought they should earn 40 times the other 99.
What do you think would happen in that tribe? Well that's what we've got now.
The average personal wealth of people in the top 1% is more than a thousand times that of people in bottom 50%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Eventually, they will reap what they sow.
There's a lot of space between "knowingly kills people for profit" and "collects user data from an app/works on a manipulative algorithm" which could make it easy for some people to pretend that they aren't doing "real" harm or to believe that the CEO was a "real problem" while they personally aren't.
I hope that the more people are held accountable for what they do (regardless of how that happens) it'll force others to do some self-reflection even if only out of a sense of self-preservation, but I'd be careful about generalizing too much. The people posting here are a pretty diverse lot, and you can find hypocrisy in any sufficiently large group. I wouldn't call HN a "glass house" but it's got a few big windows.
I'm all for changing the system, but this action likely won't do that.
Yes, all of "us" doing it industrial scale and getting paid for it are guilty. Not me, but maybe you.
So what would happen if a single juror just remained steadfast that the defendant was innocent despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Can a judge remove that juror if they believe they are not being forthright?
From what I understand a juror can only be removed during the jury selection process or if someone outside the jury "tampers" with the jurors. If you get called to jury duty, the quickest way to get out of it is to say you know about jury nullification. But if you don't reveal that and get into the jury you are free to rule as you want and to try to convince the other jurors to do the same.
With jury, you can't blame a single person for the result you didn't like. It was your neighbors that decided. And, at the same time, laws get continuously tested. Every time a jury is called, it's like a small section of society (randomly chosen, and later pruned by criteria) gathering verifying if it still makes sense.
As for the facts. While they are very important, law is also about morality. And while facts remain, morality changes all the time.
And regarding Europe. Some of the sentences handed by judges here, are so horrendous, that I would take american style jury over them any day. Especially when it comes to violent crime.
This is perjury. On your jury duty questionnaire, there was a question (something about "faithfully upholding the law" or something) which is a roundabout way of asking "By the way, you don't plan to do a jury nullification anytime soon, do you?". If you said no to that, then got on a jury, and told everyone to do a jury nullification, you've done perjury, and you actually can be punished for that.
The only legal way to nullify a law is for each member of the jury to individually decide they don't like the law and vote to nullify. You can't convict a jury for falsely acquitting. But you can convict a jury for conspiring to do so.
The situation you describe is known as a hung jury, and would result in a mistrial. Usually this means the case is retried later (with a different jury).
A judge needs cause to remove a juror. This includes a juror refusing to deliberate. In the specific case you bring up, it would be hard to prove that the juror is refusing to deliberate (i.e. "not being forthright") compared to just differently interpreting the facts of the case or the law or disagreeing with how the law should be applied.
It is the purpose of voir dire to weed out jurors with a preexisting bias in the case. You don't want to remove jurors after the case has started, as you run the risk of running out of alternates (there are probably state specific laws on how to handle this without requiring a mistrial though).
Note that this works regardless of which direction the wrong conclusion is in.
People always talk about it in the case of a juror voting to acquit someone when the evidence is that they are guilty but juror choose to disregard it, but historically it often went the other way. There's a long history of black people in the US, especially in the South, being convicted by all white juries that almost certainly would not have convicted on the exact same evidence if the accused has been white.
I don't know if there is a name for this, so I'll call it reverse-nullification, with nullification just referring to the case of acquittal of someone despite the evidence.
Unlike a nullification case, an reverse-nullification case is in theory correctable. A nullification case is not correctable because an acquittal by a jury cannot be reversed by the judge or an appeals court. A judge or appeals court can reverse a conviction so could correct an reverse-nullification case.
However, as a practical matter that often cannot actually be done because often the judge or appeals court cannot tell that it was an reverse-nullification case. A case often comes down to conflicting stories from witnesses with the jury having to decide which witnesses to believe. The conviction may have been an reverse-nullification or it might just have been that the jury found the prosecution witnesses more believable.
What do you do so wrong? What is your mechanism of getting rid of those who provide you the healthcare at low efficiency and hight cost? In Europe we have elections and when those don't yield the desired results we storm the HQ and replace by force.
You can't be expecting that when too many people die the insurance company will lose customers and the shareholders will replace the top management, right?
It's better to waste $4.75 by maximizing the inefficiency and costs of the entire system thorough extremely overpriced drugs due to various nonsensical middlemen based market structures, administrative bloat etc. and make 0.25$ than to reduce premiums. Of course it still costs $5 to the society. It might actually be better if they had higher margins...
In any case there should not be a profit motive in (health) insurance.
Total revenue is about $320B. Thompson's compensation was $1M cash + about $10m stock (the stock part doesn't impact the company's profit margin).
In any case, executive salaries are basically a rounding error in the books.
It certainly does if you use GAAP. A lot of tech companies cheat by providing GAAP and non-GAPP figures (of course there are some other cases where it makes sense) to hide stock based comp.
Regardless, people who are debilitated by injury or illness aren't going to look at 6% and say, "well, jeeze, I guess these guys really are hard done by."
They're going to wonder why something that costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year (health insurance premiums) isn't paying for a medically-necessary procedure, profits be damned.
> profits be damned.
But, profits cannot be damned, at least not if you plan on being a going concern. At some point, the companies need to make a profit otherwise they go out of business and cannot provide any healthcare at all.
My point is not that UNH is a sterling example of healthcare service but to point out that the narrative justifying the public outrage is not really logically coherent or supported by evidence. If there is no public healthcare service, you will need to have private insurers. If you have private insurers, they will need to make profit. The best you can do in this situation is make sure there is competition so the profits are not out of line (which seems to be the case) and there is minimal waste in the system (jury is out on that one).
Also, public healthcare is not the panacea that it seems to be promoted as. Healthcare is expensive and at some point, limits will be placed to avoid bankrupting the system. Take a look at any number of the systems of any number of European countries and see the wait times, approvals, etc.
BTW, I support the idea of a government provided healthcare system, but I just don't think it will solve all the problems the way people seem to think it will.
More than a handful of the BCBS health insurance companies run as non-profits. Other countries find a way to make it work without shoveling money into the gaping maw of retirement and pension funds. Hell, even profits are fine. No one expects the people at these companies to work for free. They just expect to receive coverage when they have it deemed medically necessary by a doctor. If that means that c-suiters make a max of $500k a year and that the institutional investors have to kick rocks, that's what that means.
> My point is not that UNH is a sterling example of healthcare service but to point out that the narrative justifying the public outrage is not really logically coherent or supported by evidence.
We have type one diabetics rationing their insulin to the point that they die, while the people who run the companies that are supposed to help cover the price of said insulin make millions of dollars in compensation per year. The American male has a median lifetime earnings of $1.8 million. This isn't logically incoherent or not supported by evidence; if you have a pulse and have looked at American news over the last 15 years, you'll have seen stories about people being screwed by their insurers, sometimes to the point of literal death.
> If you have private insurers, they will need to make profit.
See above.
> Also, public healthcare is not the panacea that it seems to be promoted as. Healthcare is expensive and at some point, limits will be placed to avoid bankrupting the system.
No one's suggesting it's perfect, just that it's better than having profligate executives and major shareholders insult your intelligence by telling you they just don't have the money to cover your claim for prescriptions and necessary procedures after you paid the cost of a decent used car in premiums over the last year. Even wait times seen in socialized systems could be tolerable to those who otherwise would not get to see a doctor.
If a government-run health system is such a contentious issue... turns out privatized healthcare can work just fine if there is sufficient regulation.
It left out a few key bits though - like requiring those who sign up for healthcare backpay premiums for the entire period they were uninsured to whoever they sign up with.
Then the basic plan is around 300-400 CHF (regulated by the government) and the deductibles are capped at CHF 2,500. This seems to be covering the overwhelming majority of costs (if we exclude government + cash) since the volume the market for premium/supplementary coverage seems to be pretty small (<20%):
https://www.deloitte.com/ch/en/Industries/financial-services...
How could that be? Unless that's sarcasm..
I mean the US government alone (so excluding all private spending and insurance companies) spends more on healthcare per capita than many European countries which have universal healthcare.
Switzerland has a pretty much entirely privatized healthcare system (in theory too a much higher degree than the US) which is (relatively) well regulated. Also considerably higher median salaries and GDP per capita (albeit disposable PPP income is quite a bit lower) yet they spend 35% less on healthcare than the US.
The pharmaceuticals pricing is due to the factor that pharma companies believe they can charge higher prices in the US than anywhere else so the US consumer effectively subsidizes the rest of the world. I'm not sure how to solve this problem in a way that lowers prices AND maintains availability of the drugs. The obvious solution is to demand that pharma companies lower prices in the US, but (assuming they are unable to increase prices in Europe) this will just lead to some (many?) drugs not being profitable and reducing availability of drugs for all.
As for the fancier stuff, we do want to have fancier stuff. That means you get better healthcare outcomes for some pretty sick people. We should not want to cut that out. We're in trolley experiment territory when you start discussing whether it is better to have a life-saving, but expensive, procedure available but not everyone can get it because of cost or to not have the procedure available at all for anyone.
My $25k single milliliter of fluid (https://imgur.com/a/HzqgLa2) costs the NHS about $4k in the UK.
Other countries reduce cost by having the state negotiate instead of many small insurance companies all negotiate separately. This is why other countries get a better deal because they offer a larger base of future sales.
But yeah, drug pricing might be a significant part. I'm not sure about the reduced incentives for pharmaceutical companies, though? From what I understand the system is very inefficient, there are a lot of middlemen (i.e. waste) involved and price discrimination going on so a lot of that money might not necessarily be going to the drug companies doing the research.
These people make vast sums of money every year by asking the American people what it's worth to them to not be ruined by a chance illness or injury, then finding ways to make sure they don't have to save people from financial ruin or death. I don't see how that's really so different from a protection racket, except for the fact that most protection rackets were operated with more good faith effort towards the extorted.
This definition of a "protection racket" is a bit loose. By similar logic landlords are also a "protection racket" for having a place to hive.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” - known Marxist-Leninist Adam Smith
It's also not an American's business to come in and tell India how to run its healthcare system.
(which is absolutely not universal in any OECD-country sense)
Criminal consequences of a company collectively being responsible for the deaths of individual(s) shouldn't just disappear because no one individual ostensibly caused it. A company is a system of incentives and processes, and if those incentives and processes are leading to preventable deaths and suffering, those who benefit most from and are most responsible for perpetuating those incentives and processes should be held liable.
In stuff like drug crimes, US even has the death penalty as sanctioned remedy for quantities and enterprises of sufficient organization for mega profits. The thought process seems to be if you provide bad health care in the form of selling illegal drugs, at some level the death penalty is on the table.
Right, but only for financial crimes. You're not going to get off murder by saying you only got $100 for the hit.
If you sell $100M of fentanyl you can get the death sentence, since fentanyl is an element in inducing death at basically any sufficiently large quantity of a criminal enterprise.
It is not exactly the same, but it has a lot of parallels to the argument I see here. If you are an insurance salesman selling contracts you know will not be honored and such denied claims will be an element of death, many will not see it as serious as being the criminal enterprise leader who orchestrated it. Even in such case that the policy can be attributed to a single salesman, the executive is likely to be held more culpable just as the US code holds the criminal enterprise executive to the death penalty whereas it may not hold the low level guy who sold the fentanyl.
It is definitely a very strange one. The classical liberalism argument is that the most prominent aspect remains essentially a financial crime of failure to pay the licensing tax.
That describes a bunch of crimes? If you raid a drug dealer's house and kill a bunch of people in the process, you'll go to jail. If it's the police doing it with a "license" (ie. a warrant), it's suddenly fine. More banal is you driving along, following all applicable laws and causing no issues, but if you're doing it without a license or insurance, it's suddenly illegal.
I pointed it out largely because I find the drug laws to be particularly strange.
Financial crimes are literally crimes that deprive people of their financial property. They are crimes because property is understood to have utility. This isnt rocket science.
Under me is 1000 salesman. Every salesman knows and understands I am selling a plan that will deny or delay for some covered minor ailments that once in a million set off a chain inducing death.
As CEO of ICI I collect $300M in premiums and from that take $3M.
After selling a million policies, a patient dies as a side effect of intentional strategy of denying authorization to pay for care. That plan is traced to going through a single salesman, who collected $5 from that sale and $50k in all his sales. From that same sales, I, the CEO only collected $1. That is, the dollar profit for the death is greater for the salesman than the CEO.
The salesman and I are both direct paths in the death, in fact the salesman more than me, hell the salesman even made more of a commission than I did. The public will likely hold me more in contempt.
Can you explain what point are you making and how does it relate to what we were discussing?
As for where I started, my initial comments involved both financial crimes and drug dealing. Most but not all probably consider insurance fraud as a financial crime but one that some can only atone through vigilantism. The line to me on all accounts looks blurry.
I also didn't say that should be the only factor. Clearly proximate responsibility for the relevant decisions should be (and already is) part of the equation.
We know the crimes against humanity are bad and subordinates are guilty if they do them. We don;t just let everyone off free except the head of state.
Not to see that united healtcare (as bad as they are) are anywhere near that, but I am saying that its clear that we, as a society, already hold all people complicit in evil as guilty. Not just the person at the top.
The US as a society allows its citizens actions that the US as a country has prosecuted others for.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
How much do you think people should pay for some random person to be afforded one more hour of life free of pain? $1000? $1000000? $100000000? More?
Now you can hope for a state owned one which would have "everyone" chipping in so you should be able to cover more extreme cases. Or you can (and should imo) criticize the algorithms used by the current companies. But you cannot expect society to pay for anything, you have to do some triage.
> When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
We can compare this to, say, all the people involved in the death camps in Nazi Germany. Who exactly is culpable for murder? Ther person dropping the Zyklon B? Or were they just following orders? The camp commandant who gave the orders? Or were they just following orders? What about the camp guards? What about the train operators? Those who maintained the trains? Those who built and maintained the camps? Those who loaded the trains? Those who detained Jews and other "undesirables"?
In the case of death-by-denail of health coverage, there are many hands involved (hence "social murder"). Personally, I don't blame the people who man the phones, for example. They are coerced into a job. But someone is responsible and you can make a reasonable claim that the CEO fits that bill. Where you draw the line between those two is another question. There are no doubt people working at United whose job it is to come up with creative ways of denying claims. Their bonuses are probably tied to it. You can make a reasonable case that they're aware of the consequences of their action. Are they culpable too?
Additionallly, people tend to view violence as violence or not depending on who does it. Like tossing tear gas cannisters at protestors is not violence but throwing the cannister back is [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
[2]: https://fox11online.com/news/local/charges-filed-against-man...
What about those people that are using United Health Care and getting the support they need? They account for nothing?
For example I had an insurance company not want to pay for a particular prescription drug my doctor prescribed. They were happy to pay for treating me, but they wanted it be done with some other drug.
They actually had a medical reason for this. The drug I had been prescribed had recently been found to have a risk of bladder cancer. There were other drugs just as effective but that did not have that risk and so they had removed it from their formulary.
In this case I wanted the first drug because I had used it before and knew that it worked well for me and that I didn't get any of the numerous annoying side effects that it and the alternatives could all have, and I had good reason to believe that I'd only need to be back on it for a month or two and then would be permanently done with it.
I concluded that the risk of bladder cancer from a couple months of the drug were negligible and preferable to dealing with drugs I'd never had before.
My doctor probably could have convinced them to go ahead and approve a one month subscription with the possibility of one refill, but I realized the drug was one of the ones that Walmart had on their $4 drug list and so had my doctor send the prescription there and I bought it for the cash price.
BTW, that $4 cash price at Walmart was cheaper than what I would have paid if my doctor had convinced the insurance to cover it and I filled the prescription at my regular pharmacy.
But the take that purchasing insurance is a simple two-party agreement of willing participants who have options to go elsewhere is just purely naive. This is not a simple financial product like buying life insurance or car insurance or fire insurance for your house where you go shopping and buy or don't buy.
In the United States, there are just no other choices. You get health insurance as part of your employement (typically), which is insane on the face of it. The government (basically) does not provide health as a service, even though it would seem that health is as fundamental a service as it gets.
Health Insurance companies are for-profit entities whose absolute incentives are to maximize financial return to their shareholders, not maximize health in their policyholders. And whether they say it explicitly or not, the way you maximize financial return as an insurance company is take in more money than you pay out. And in situations where you have some amount of leeway over whether to pay out or not, the way you do that is try to pay out as little as possible and deny claims as much as possible. That's just pure logic.
This is not "did your house burn down" or "did you car crash" or "did you die" binary type of stuff with typical insurance. This is nuanced decision-making, all with an overarching goal is maximizing financial return and minimizing claims paid. Period.
While a specific person at a health insurance company may not be evil, and while the business itself may not be evil, the net result of the entire end-to-end system can absolutely be quite evil.
The result of health insurance is that people who could otherwise not afford to pay their own healthcare costs frequently can (but not always, when claims are denied). In turn, people who are healthy (and lucky) subsidize those less fortunate than themselves. This is not evil, this is good. This is something humans have invented to make us stronger as a collective.
You can argue that a society should do more to proactively provide healthcare so that you don't need a private health insurance system, but that doesn't then make the private system bad.
Statistically they should all be in the same ballpark. The industry average is 16%, but UHC has 32% so double! No reason for that.
By the way, can you help me understand what a 'pre-existing condition' is? Literally nobody outside of America has experience with this term.
How could it be otherwise? Insurance was invented to hedge risk. In the case of healthcare, if you literally already have a condition that has known and ongoing costs associated with it, it doesn't make any sense for an insurance company to insure you against that risk – the risk has already manifested.
You’re a legal resident? You have 100% healthcare same as everyone else. There isn’t even a question about pre existing anything
For example many Germans will have experience with it because they have a system that has both a public and a private system. Those with high enough income (around 70k Euros) can opt out of the public system and use the private system instead. Also there are some classes of people that only can get part of their coverage from the public system and so need to buy additional coverage through the private system.
Insurers in that private system can take into account pre-existing conditions. They cannot reject an application over pre-existing conditions but they can charge higher premiums because of those conditions.
Another example is Switzerland. They have a universal healthcare system based on mandatory insurance from private health insurance companies. For that mandatory insurance pre-existing conditions are not a factor, but there is also supplemental insurance available that covers things not included in the mandatory insurance.
The supplemental providers can and do consider pre-existing conditions when deciding whether or not to provide coverage.
It's insulting to a person's intelligence to tell them "we just don't have the money to cover the surgery recommended by doctors to solve your debilitating injury or illness" and then turn around and give your c-suite seven-figure compensation packages every year while also instituting a dividend for the free riders known as shareholders.
>Switzerland has universal health care,[3] regulated by the Swiss Federal Law on Health Insurance. There are no free state-provided health services, but private health insurance is compulsory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country)
The do also offer supplemental insurance for things beyond what the compulsory insurance covers and those supplemental plans are for-profit.
A separate issue is consolidation. In my area, what used to be locally owned clinics and hospitals are being bought up by national conglomerates. Their first move is often to reduce staffing and cut costs, driving up delays and driving down quality of care.
Actually, I take that back. If we think of a "free lunch" as something that isn't earned, the only free lunch here is the one that shareholders (which includes the c-suite given their share grants in the compensation packages) receive quarterly in the form of dividends and earnings-per-share. When you take someone's money (usually $200/month or more... much more actually), find every single excuse to not provide a service a doctor of medicine has declared to be necessary, and then pay yourself more money than most people would even know how to spend in a lifetime, you're pretending you're entitled to a free lunch.
When I started working ~25 years ago, my health insurance was typically fully covered by my employer and I had no deductible that I was aware of. The cost of insurance has only gotten worse, and finding a plan without a outrageous deductible adds to that.
As a society, this is something we can totally solve. So many other countries have socialized healthcare. Its not an impossible goal.
OK, but American "lunch" costs 2-3x what it does everywhere else, with similar/worse outcomes.
(And yes, that's counting taxes.)
We're ordering oatmeal and being charged wagyu filet prices.
I, at this moment, have a syringe with a mililiter of fluid on my desk that's worth more than both of my cars combined. https://imgur.com/a/HzqgLa2
It's about 1/10th that in the UK.
My insurance pays for a colonoscopy every 5-10 years, telehealth therapy appointments with no copay, free vaccinations, really a lot of stuff.
No, you pay for those. Via your premiums.
(Which your employer may pay a significant part of. That's ultimately lost salary to you; it isn't out of charity on their part either.)
My family health insurance costs $3k/month. Going up ~10% next month, too.
If the US does worse on population health statistics than other countries do it is not the fault of our healthcare system but rather the fault of social determinants of health such as social disconnection, inequality, etc.
That's OK, we have stats for that. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
> If the US does worse on population health statistics than other countries do it is not the fault of our healthcare system but rather the fault of social determinants of health such as social disconnection, inequality, etc.
Other countries have these things, too.
It is sensible to have a universal health care system: everyone pays for it and everybody will use it.
This is a take that lacks any nuance and it doesn't even pertain to what anyone said. Typical for conservatives.
No one is saying we need to provide healthcare for literally $0 and pretend it has no costs. No, most realize our current cobbled together system with middlemen everywhere isn't working and it's costing lives. Why we can't have a single payer system that gets rid of the paperwork and makes it easier to bargain against prices is beyond me.
Sure, let's keep this system where you have to worry about in/out network hospitals, jump through a bunch of hoops to get treatment, and middlemen causing prices to surge. Madness.
If the company was PERFECTLY run, you're still going to have tons of people getting denied claims. That's what happens with the law of big numbers.
And guess what. You're never going to have a perfectly run company.
If you take the CEOs salary and distribute it to healthcare patients, $50M worth of healthcare is not going to even minutely move the needle.
UHC revenue is $100B PER QUARTER. The CEO's pay is not even a rounding error on a rounding error.
Was the CEO a perfect, honorable guy? No.
Is taking his salary and spending it on patients going to do anything? In the large picture, also, no.
Like isn't the entire sector just inefficient bloat? What value does it provide that can't be provided much more efficiently?
Then healthcare fraud would be 80% of GDP.
Why can't we start by removing insurances ability to deny anything from a licensed doctor? If doctors are padding their wallets or stealing, bring it up with the board of medical examiners or court just like any other malfeasance in any other regulated industry. If you are board-certified in X it means you are entrusted to do X. Insurance should never be involved.
You're still paying the same people the same wages to work for the government.
Or is your solution that we should pay health insurance workers less money?
You originally proposed eliminating all the jobs. Now you've moved all the jobs to the public sector. So unless you're paying them dirt, all that money is still going to people working to make sure healthcare fraud isn't 80% of GDP.
In a perfect world, you have 6% more money to spend on healthcare instead of corporate profits.
That's not going to change the picture that much.
And you're unlikely to arrive in a perfect world.
You'll probably get a 10% more expensive system that's 9% more inefficient and has 0 profits.
I live in BC, Canada, and we don't have an entire industry built around claims processing, administration, etc. They still pay health care workers, but they don't have to have phone banks filled with people answering questions about claim denials. I'm not even sure if a claim denial is a thing here, or who I would call. We don't have healthcare insurance CEOs making 23mm per year. We don't have customer service reps, we don't have billing specialists in every medical practice, we don't have medical coding experts. These things kind of exist in a bare minimum way, but not anywhere at the scale that I have seen in the US.
I go to the doctor, they make a medical determination about what my needs are, and we proceed from there. There is almost no fraud because the doctor has no real financial incentive to overtreat me, and since it is a single payer system, malicious patterns get picked up quickly and efficiently.
Keep in mind that each province administers their own medical system, so there is no such thing as the Canadian health insurance system.
There certainly must be people doing all of this claims processing, maybe not an "industry" since it's part of the government: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/practitioner-profe...
> They still pay health care workers, but they don't have to have phone banks filled with people answering questions about claim denials. I'm not even sure if a claim denial is a thing here, or who I would call.
There's a long list of rejected claim codes for BC here: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/practitioner-profe...
And a support center for handling questions and disputes: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/practitioner-profe... And an appeals process: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...
The Canadian system may be much cheaper to administer, but it isn't magical. There is still a need for staff to administer and adjudicate claims, and you still have to ration limited healthcare resources somehow.
The first link you submitted is actually showing how the automated system processes the huge majority of claims automatically without people in the loop. So not a good argument that BC has phone banks of people answering claims questions.
Yes the claim process exists, and the various appeals parts exist, but that part of MSP is just not the patient's problem. If you read through the reasons for denial that you linked, almost all of them are requests for better paperwork or missing information. The level of administrative overhead just doesn't exist on the scale that I have experienced living in the states.
What I have never had happen, or heard of happening, is a resident getting a bill for seeking medical care (which would happen if a claim was rejected). Or someone not receiving medical care due to inability to pay. Or having to doctor shop for a place that accepts their insurance. In fact, most people I know have never even had to contact MSP.
But it isn't just the Canadian system -- it's every other system too.[0]
There is a unique form of corruption occurring in the American health system and it is absolutely tied to the insurance industry.
This corruption causes the misallocation of resources in ways that are detrimental to the health of American citizens.
Medical bankruptcy and the cost that it has on a person's health isn't really a thing in Canada. Having to choose between paying for medical bills or healthy food isn't really a thing in Canada. People putting off minor medical issues until they grow into major issues because they can't afford routine checkups or treatments isn't really a thing in Canada.
This results in far less rationing of healthcare because people are able to make better choices that prevent the waste of medical resources.
Don't get me wrong, there are issues with Canadian healthcare -- the biggest being corrupt politicians and business people trying to import American healthcare practices for their personal gain but the issues that the average Canadian face in accessing healthcare are nothing compared to those that the average American faces.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_heal...
The vast majority of healthcare fraud does not come from corrupt dentists convincing you to get root canals you don't need.
The largest source is billing for services not rendered.
That is: some provider just makes up that you came to see them and charges the insurance company and you don't even know about it.
This is a non-trivial problem to solve.
Even in the NHS in the UK - where the entire system, including the providers, are public - there is STILL a large billing for services not rendered problem!
This seems trivially solvable. In BC, Canada, I had an old doctor renew a prescription over the phone. This must have triggered a fraud alert because my address was now in a different health management district. They sent me an automatic notice asking me to confirm that I had been helped by that doctor at that time. I believe I can also log onto a provincial portal and see activity related to my medical care.
Seems like a pretty low cost way to ensure that no fraud is happening. Set up triggers for confirmation like doctors treating people who don't live nearby, treating people who are concurrently seeing other doctors, or any number of other known fraud alerts, and follow up.
Since private practice isn't really allowed here, getting removed from the provincial insurance program means a career death sentence, so I think that it just isn't that big of a problem anyway.
In a situation like that many people can proactively look over their records to determine if such corruption is happening.
Why isn't NHS doing it then?
I've proposed eliminating those jobs because they're bullshit jobs that have a net negative contribution to society because the American medical system is hopelessly inefficient and corrupt.[0]
It is a curious thing watching people defend the undefendable. What makes you so confident in this system that so many Americans loathe and feel betrayed by?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_heal...
In short, you're wrong.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
> The FTC’s administrative complaint alleges that CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s ESI, and United Health Group’s Optum, and their respective GPOs—Zinc Health Services, Ascent Health Services, and Emisar Pharma Services—have abused their economic power by rigging pharmaceutical supply chain competition in their favor, forcing patients to pay more for life-saving medication. According to the complaint, these PBMs, known as the Big Three, together administer about 80% of all prescriptions in the United States.
The better comparison would be with other insurance carriers.
Reduce or eliminate the load.
Of course insurance will reduce their load with tactics such as deny, deny. But systemically, there's a better, good-faith way.
IMHO, without getting into all the nitty gritty details, the good-faith way to improve a ton of healthcare is to extend the efforts of fortification in common foods, expand people's consumption of healthier foods (more plants that provider fiber + minerals), improve people's abilities and motivation around healthier lifestyle choices (exercise, sleep), and significantly reduce or re-engineer illness-causing agents (plastics, VOCs) in our daily lives.
The challenge is how to implement these things in a balanced and sustainable manner, while keeping most industries relatively happy. Of course this would take a decade or more, but the knowledge is out there from some very competent healthspan PHds/MDs and a variety of scientists.
In my personal opinion, if all we did was increase consumption of sulfur, protein (especially collagenic sources), we would improve a tremendous amount of health outcomes drastically. Asian countries are a great example where the food actually has sulfur and collagenic sources built into their culture. Koreans consume cabbage 3x/day (cruciferous veggies with sulfur) and traditionally consume a bone-broth (collagenic) type of soup with 1-3 meals on the daily. I could outline the science here, but a huge amount of chronic illness, such as the shooter's mother may have seen some relief with some of my aforementioned efforts.
The way we can take for granted iodine deficiency because they added it to salt, we really need to do that for others. Omega 3s within milk these days is also a good path forward.
They make $15-20B profit annually. They aren't just funding a single well-paid role off denials.
I have a hard time buying this. Really? You can't cover a few more cents of a few more claims if you reduce c-suite pay?
I don't pay my premium to just see it go directly to the c-suite and some retirement fund's coffers. I pay it to cover healthcare costs and to keep from being financially ruined by a chance illness or injury.
If the CEO is making a half-million a year and his company is coming to me telling me that there just isn't any money to cover my back injury surgery, they're negotiating in far better faith than if they're paying him ~5x the median lifetime earnings of the American male each year, every year.
Good faith matters.
>I have a hard time buying this. Really? You can't cover a few more cents of a few more claims if you reduce c-suite pay?
Nice job moving the goalposts from "moving the needle" to "a few more cents of a few more claims". UnitedHealth Group had 371.6 billion in revenue last year. $50 M means they can provide 0.01% more care to their customers. I think it's fair to describe that as "not going to even minutely move the needle".
Either the numbers matter or they don't. Pick one.
>1. (idiomatic) To change a situation to a noticeable degree
Emphasis mine.
It's 100% noticeable. If it weren't, then it wouldn't matter to people like the c-suite who are so focused on making money for themselves.
A single Tylenol in a hospital costs $15.
If you think a few cents is going to do anything, you are completely bamboozled.
A few cents is nothing in healthcare.
I'm well aware of what things cost.
Maybe instead of paying for the c-suite's bonuses, they need to be paying someone to air the dirty laundry of the health system that's charging $15 for an acetaminophen. When someone's f*cking both you and your customer like that, you go after them. But it's not about that, is it? It's about transferring value to shareholders, not reducing the costs of care. Hell, doing actual work to reduce the cost of care is expensive, and we can't possibly expect the retirement funds and major shareholders of America to pay for that.
It's almost as if it's not an easy problem to solve, or some other health insurance company would do it and put all the other ones out of business.
And they're not. Like I said, the goal of for-profit health insurance companies is not to maximize economic benefits for customers; it's to maximize economic benefits for shareholders. It's a lot easier to transfer value to shareholders by just denying the claim submitted by the customer for that pill than it is to actually (legally) beat the entity charging for the pill into permanent submission. So that's what they do.
Except health insurance is regulated, and you can only maximize profits to a small degree (which is the only reason UHC's profit margin is 6% instead of 40%).
This incentivizes health insurance companies to provide a good enough service that people want their insurance. Capturing a lot of the market is their ONLY way to make money.
They literally don't have the option to ask, "how do we just take more of our customers money and stuff it in our pockets?"
That's not really that terrible if the company is Apple and selling products that nobody NEEDS. It is terrible if you've only got a few choices and their selling something everyone needs - hence the regulation of profits.
It's almost as if our country isn't run by complete idiots.
Is it a perfect system? No.
Is there an obvious, far superior system? Also, no.
Yes there is.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Life_exp...
Review it, then come back to us.
[0]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
It's almost as if the world isn't so reductive complex issues can be reduced to cute little charts.
You didn't look at the chart, did you?
At some point declines are a protection against quackery.
The principle carries in so far as you hold up your contract for covered claims until bankrupt.
Or to use an analogy, which HN absolutely hates and will nitpick since an analogy is never the same thing: you do not get to trespass someone from your airplane while you are in flight. If the airplane catastrophically fails and someone is sucked out, then there is a pass.
It does not appear these denied claims are just people getting sucked out of a catastrophically failed aircraft.
Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
This is what these health insurance companies are doing routinely. Murder by inaction and calling it anything else is playing in their hands.
The fact that courts are costly and slow is exactly why these companies use them to "delay".
So everyone in said countries is guilty of murder because they're not donating 100% of their time and energy to helping cure cancer?
That's not at all how this works. You can't just legislate infinite resources into existence. And infinite resources is exactly what it would take to give everyone a 100% perfect standard of care.
Deciding what's covered and what isn't is literally the whole job of an insurance company. Otherwise we could just put money into a pot and let anyone take out any amount they feel like, whenever they feel like it, for whatever purpose they deem necessary at their sole discretion. (And if that sounds like a good idea to you, I'd urge you to think things through a bit more carefully before you waste your money by trying it.)
Certainly not murder, involuntary manslaughter maybe. In any case, what is the basis for this obligation? You would concede that, as a consequence of imposing involuntary obligations on their citizens, these countries are less free? And you would also concede that reasonable people can disagree about the priorities of their values, and that valuing personal autonomy over collective well-being is a reasonable position?
> Murder by inaction and calling it anything else is playing in their hands.
What about doctors and nurses who refuse to work for free? Should we also shoot them? What about pharmaceutical companies that refuse to invest billions into drug development, or hospitals that refuse to purchase expensive facilities and equipment, without without a reasonable expectation of a return on their investment? Are they murderers too?
This worldview of holding people accountable for failing to intervene is simply not tenable. People are responsible for their direct actions. If you injure someone, you are responsible for your actions and the outcome they produced. If you simply come across an injured (or sick) person, you are in no way more obligated to them than you are to such a person on the other side of the world.
You also seem to be operating from the presumption that insurance companies do not add any value to the system, and that careful scrutiny of claims is motivated only by greed. I beg to differ. I want to be insured alongside other people with a similar risk profile to myself (eg. no drinking/drugs/smoking, daily exercise, good sleep, healthy body composition) to the exclusion of others. I want my insurance company to carefully scrutinize its applicants and claimants, on my behalf, to ensure that my interests are being well-represented. Insurance does not mean absolution from personal responsibility.
That's the case in US as well? If you show up to an ER they have to at least stabilize you.
The mess is deeper, but starting an insurance company is not easy either, one could blame the regulations. And then one cannot blame regulations either, it's the regulators/govt who are ultimately voted/allowed by the people. It's a case where every one passes the buck, and so no one single entity is responsible for the mess.
Look at even small groups of common people, the most power hungry get to the top, common people vote for the most charismatic/popular, not the most competent. Blaming the powerful evil people is self defeating and absolves personal responsibility.
Common people are also a divided lot. Petty issues, bickering and entertainment keep them engaged. As the saying goes: divide and rule.
-- Hannah Arendt
> Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
You do realize that these companies lobby to make sure that it stays inefficient, right?
In the cases where they don't use the court system, they use arbitration, which is usually tilted in the favor of insurance companies.
If you want a fair shake at getting the benefits you paid for, you have to go through the courts. Given the nature of the subject of the lawsuit, there's a real chance that you'll be dead or bankrupt before you get your day in court. That's not a system that works. And when there are systems that don't work, there are on occasion people who will go outside the system to make their own. There is no scenario in which vigilantism is completely eliminated when you have people making massive sums of money off of refusing to do business in good faith.
More people need to read the cautionary tale of Ken Rex McElroy and the town of Skidmore, MO.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but my health insurance makes it very clear what the benefits I paid for are. There’s guidance after guidance and tool after tool to help minimize any surprise costs.
...and how has it gone when you tried to use them? Just as a personal anecdote: I once tried to get UHC to partially reimburse me for an out-of-network mental health expense. My policy explicitly covered such reimbursement (at a lower rate, of course). I tried for months to get the claim reimbursed. My employer at the time retained the services of a "healthcare concierge", and one of the main things they did was fight insurance companies on your behalf. That concierge service tried for six months to get a single claim reimbursed.
We all gave up.
It was such a small dollar amount; UHC likely spent more time and effort denying the claim than it would have cost to reimburse. It boggles my mind, to this day.
Just because your health insurance "makes it very clear what the benefits I paid for are" has no relation to whether or not they will actually pay those benefits out to you. If you haven't really experience this yet in America, I can only conclude that you are either rather healthy (and haven't used the benefits much), very lucky, or possibly both.
This is crazy. Maybe it's not "murder" in the traditional sense but you are making a choice on whether someone gets life-saving care, or lives in immense pain for the rest of their lives until they commit suicide. Again, this kind of normalized violence is justified when it's a business making choices to increase profits. We are so disconnected from our humanity that rounding errors in an Excel sheet mean actual lives are being ended, but that's okay.
They budget differently, but they won't use unlimited resources on every situation.
Is the care life-saving or pain-preventing?
There is an additional option: the person pays for it. Or someone else pays for it. Since the 1980s U.S. emergency rooms have been required to provide life-saving care regardless of whether someone can pay.
> normalized violence
It is not violence to fail to reimburse someone.
If someone cannot pay his bills, then he declares bankruptcy, the debts are wiped out, his creditors take a haircut and he moves on with his life. In many/most states he will get to retain his home and perhaps his vehicle. It’s not the end of the world?
Is it ideal? No, of course not. It’s better than dying, and of course it’s not murder.
Those can be the same thing for some people. Chronic pain patients have a dramatically worse mortality rate.
> If someone cannot pay his bills, then he declares bankruptcy, the debts are wiped out, his creditors take a haircut and he moves on with his life.
I’ve done this. Due to medical expenses, in fact. It costs money up front, and was difficult to navigate as a well educated person with family support.
The idea that this is an easy option for a single person with no supports and a disabling condition is insane.
Many doctors won’t see you after, either. Bankruptcy doesn’t mean people you burned have to keep doing business with you.
Furthermore, absent major life events (job change, marriage, new child, etc) there is only one time of year when health insurance changes can be made, a time of year called Open Enrollment.
Finally, if you are self employed and you don't live in a state with a well functioning Obamacare market, your health insurance options are often quite limited.
In other words, it is frequently made impossible, by law, to switch providers.
And why doesn't the employer switch? Because health care plans typically have doctors that they like more than other doctors ("in network" vs "out of network"), so most people gravitate toward the preferred doctors. ("Like" means "cover better", so the patient pays less.) If your company changes health care insurers, then many people would have economic pressure to switch away from their current doctors, which is a hassle.
TL;DR: There's a lot of friction in various forms here. That's why. Yes, people can switch, but it's expensive and painful, so most don't, even though the option is technically there.
Surely you are not that naive, please carry yourself in these conversations with a modicum of self-respect.
Key traits associated with psychopathy include: 1. Affective Traits: • Lack of empathy (emotional detachment from others’ suffering) • Shallow emotions (restricted emotional range) • Absence of guilt or remorse • Callousness 2. Interpersonal Traits: • Superficial charm • Grandiosity (inflated sense of self-worth) • Manipulativeness • Deceptiveness or pathological lying
People defend planetary scale psychopathy because it’s quite literally business as usual.
- He committed the crime and had another target in mind
- He committed the crime and really didn't think he'd get away with it so he kept it to keep some unknown options open.
- He committed the crime and didn't want any doubt that he was guilty when he got caught. Perhaps he wanted the media to be focussed more on the "why" than "is it him?" speculation.
How about some of the possible reasons he was at a McDonalds instead of many other ways to get food that wouldn't have security cameras
- He was ready to be caught as the media cycle was moving on and he perceived momentum of empathy for him right now
- He was ready to be caught because being on the run was too hard and not inline with his goals
- He wasn't thinking clearly and didn't really have much of a post-shooting plan outside of getting out of NYC
- He felt safe in that town
- He overestimated his support
Seems pretty likely that this was the case. Getting away from the site of the crime is challenging enough!
He was smart enough to carry away the feat without getting caught. He is not smart socially, his demise doesn't serve his purpose. Sounds like fit to be an engineer. And kind of suicidal.
That being said - some obvious stuff he could have done like grow a beard and shave it after and fly out of the country to somewhere cheap like Thailand with $10k
Just 2 days ago, the police reported they found his backpack with jacket inside and a veterinary gun nearby... now he had the same jacket, backpack and another unlicenced gun with him. His eyebrows and nose are different, can clearly see it from the few released pictures.
CCTV footage shows a guy with certain features.
Days later, after no leads whatsoever, another photo shows a guy with markedly different features.
Now authorities say they have caught a guy matching the second footage. He conveniently walked into a McDonalds with his manifesto, fake ID, and a 3d printed gun. ???
Idk man, could be legit I guess... But it is a bit wild that so many people are taking all this at face value, unquestioned; as if there isn't tremendous pressure on authorities to deliver a neatly packaged conclusion to the story at almost any cost.
What other "more pressing matters" could there be anyway? Making license plates? This guy is smart and experienced with software development. It would be a waste for him to do something as mundane as making license plates or digging ditches (I don't even think they use prisoners for that these days).
Random thought, but this made me imagine him reviewing code as a punishment: A chain gang of reviewers if you will.
ONE OF the main functions of the prison system today is access to prison slave labor, so I imagine they'll keep him busy.
Ignore the media stories, their paychecks are written with corporate ad money. On the Internet people of all kinds seem to like the guy.
"Violence never solved anything" is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.
"A take I found online that I think is interesting:"
Like many absolute statements, this claim is just plain wrong. America (and many other countries) were started by revolutions. The revolutionaries had guns.
Countries like India are unique for gaining freedom without violence.
I mean just look at Syria. I don't have any feelings good or bad towards the rebels. But people have been trying to get rid of Assad for ages and it just took the right people with guns.
One man's violence is another's righteous revolution. All political power is at the end of the barrel of a gun.
There was a lot of violence leading up to and, sadly, after the independence of India. Gandhi was nonviolent, but many of the freedom fighters for India's independence were not.
The US's antiviral anti colonial stance also helped.
-Jefferson
It's worth the paper it's written on, perhaps less. It gives fools the fodder for the braying the rhetoric they speak and argue.
The state promotes violence by the state, and being docile for the citizen.
What media are you consuming? Take a look at any list of top-grossing films of the past few decades and it's riddled with non-state lone wolf actors using violence to solve their problems.
You're saying that John Wick, Creed, Spider-Man, The Fall Guy, Furiosa, Venom, etc. are teaching Americans to be pacifists?
Yes, America's problem is it's just too peaceful, at home and abroad.
Like, it's a neat hypothesis. The data just don't fit, certainly not for America. We have high rates of gun ownership and gun violence (as well as other violence, e.g. at bars and schoolyards) precisely because we like taking justice into our own hands.
I disagree with his thoughts on violence. When you try to solve a problem by inviting violence to dinner you'll find you have a guest you are unable to excuse.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/why-nonviolen...
https://roarmag.org/essays/chenoweth-stephan-nonviolence-myt...
Chenoweth's own subsequent research indicates the issue is far more nuanced, and that states have to some extended adapted to/exploited the strategic challenges posed by nonviolent resistance.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002234332210929... (paywalled, sorry)
I'm no health plutocrat. In fact, I've been unemployed for the past several years due to a chronic health condition. I'm currently getting private health coverage through Medicaid.
Recall that Chenoweth started out believing that violence was more effective, then changed her mind after looking at the data.
The internet's response to the CEO shooting has revealed that there is a huge appetite for violence. People with an appetite for violence appear to vastly outnumber those without on sites such as reddit. I'm seeing a lot of arguments in favor of violence, and nearly all of them strike me as quite shoddy. I wish I had the time and energy to respond to all of the bad arguments, but I don't have it.
I started reading your roarmag article (found through the internet archive), and it doesn't seem very compelling.
* The author starts from the premise that BLM succeeded through violence, which seems dubious.
* He seems to assume that "a counterhegemonic and politically radical viewpoint became perplexingly commonsensical overnight" due to violence, and doesn't seem to understand that correlation isn't the same as causation.
* He points out various issues with the study, which weaken the strength of its conclusion, but also seem sort of inescapable when doing this kind of research.
I stopped reading when it became clear to me the author was "telling the audience what they wanted to hear", to use your phrasing. ("ROAR was an online journal of the radical imagination...")
As long as we're going to assume that correlation is causation, I notice that your second link states that
"the success rate of nonviolent resistance campaigns has declined since 2001"
and also
"incidental violence by dissidents has become a more common feature of contemporary nonviolent campaigns compared with earlier cases"
Wonder if those facts are related? Nonviolence isn't what it used to be, and also it's now become less effective?
>states have to some extended adapted to/exploited the strategic challenges posed by nonviolent resistance.
Sure -- and they've adapted to the strategic challenges posed by violent resistance as well, I'd argue.
Get the violent ones on your side to ultinately win. Got it.
I don't think she's making the point she thinks she's making. And yes, I read the rest of the article. It focused primarily on events taking place in places where, lets face it, there's not quite the ah... oomph in gen pop that exists in the U.S. It's ulitimately a nice thought. It's absolutely accurate in that things like generalized striking and boycotts are great preambles as well. They're also considered illegal in the U.S. to coordinate btw, because of previous run ins with said efficacy during wartime in WWII. Secondary striking was outlawed. So formal unions can't use that as a tactic. You can thank the Taft-Hartley act for that.
So... Yeah. Might want to meditate on that one a bit harder.
2) Therefore, one could say that nonviolent action is most effective and bringing about the current corporate-controlled system.
Of course, that makes sense. But let's say you want to take down a corporate-controlled system. Then violence is likely to be much more effective.
If you want to make a change where the majority (or at list the rich majority) don't want, then violence will be much more effective. For example, I think it's likely that this one killing will do more to cause a renewed vigor in revamping America's health care than any nonviolent protest, because the richest capitalists and shareowners are against it.
So you're saying violence is a morally acceptable way for a minority to force its will on a majority? This just sounds like an argument for dictatorship.
- - -
I think whatever argument you make in favor of violence, you should anticipate that your political opponents will make the exact same argument to excuse their violence. So whatever argument you make -- be sure it's an argument you are OK with your political opponents using.
A social contract regarding the times and places where it's acceptable to use violence is actually a really valuable thing. Confucius was actually on to something.
Heck, even the mere fact that the suspect was arrested was based on state-sanctioned "violence". If the police didn't have guns and weren't allowed to use force to arrest people, no amount of non-violent actions would convince a murder suspect to voluntarily present themselves and subject themselves to trial in court.
Violence is probably generally bad overall, but the original statement that "Violence never solved anything" is just plainly false and a lie. It's not a defensible position.
> A social contract regarding the times and places where it's acceptable to use violence is actually a really valuable thing.
Right, this statement itself shows violence does work in a particular context and situation. Far from "violence never solved anything".
Degradation of the social contract and the response of those who disagree are potential problems with violence. That makes them on-topic.
>Heck, even the mere fact that the suspect was arrested was based on state-sanctioned "violence". If the police didn't have guns and weren't allowed to use force to arrest people, no amount of non-violent actions would convince a murder suspect to voluntarily present themselves and subject themselves to trial in court.
Indeed. I'm arguing that lawful violence should not, in general, be considered morally equivalent to unlawful violence.
When the state punishes a violent robber, that's not morally equivalent to me randomly punishing someone because I don't like their face. If people are able to successfully argue that these two situations are morally equivalent, expect your society to become a miserable place rather quickly.
I'm not sure why you're hung up on the specific phrase "violence never solved anything", given that it doesn't seem to appear in this comment's grandparent chain.
No, I think it's a much more subtle concept than just giving a binary yes or no. Definitely willing to discuss away from this forum though.
> I think whatever argument you make in favor of violence, you should anticipate that your political opponents will make the exact same argument to excuse their violence.
They (capitalists) already use violence to enforce their society.
Those who've lived total commitment to violence are it's loudest opponents. I hope we can continue to listen to their stories.
Somehow people miss the fact that the difference and power to effect change resides in the context, not with violence itself.
The list of failed revolutions that left everyone worse off is far longer the the list of revolutions that resulted in the betterment of society.
Some believe King was successful in part because of the threat of violence from alternative groups like the Black Panthers.
Nonviolent protest and organizing is more dangerous because it could quickly become a populist movement. A small group of people incited into violence, is already fringe and can be quickly suppressed.
"...embraced an emperor, and raped and looted the rest of Europe."
The number of years is really besides the point, which was to call out the consequences were long lasted, not just limited to the terror, and and included the wars.
I assure you, criticism of the French revolution is not a hot new take.
I just dont think mobs parading around the heads of bakers helps advance those ideals, let alone get the bread that doesn't exist for their hungry children.
Events can have an unlimited number of necessary causes or preconditions.
Great men of History can have huge impacts, but usually ride massive tides of population level phenomenon, like economics, culture, and public sentiment.
The Zionist movement had a certain role to play in the Holocaust, didn't it? But most people would consider it a grave error in judgment to attribute blame to this movement for a certain part of Holocaust victims.
One of the big problems with the King was that he was trying to implement tax reform to pay down France's foreign debt. The revolution simultaneously aborted this effort and worsened the situation.
I think an analogous situation that is often taught in textbooks is the impact of the treaty of Versailles on Germany. One could compare the relative impact of the treaty and Hitler on the course of history. I think most historians would argue that the rise of fascism and some war would have happened with or without Hitler as a result of the treaty terms. I think Hitler's personality shaped the scope and detail of that war, and the specific intensity of internal policy. However, without him awar would still have broken out, just with a different individual at the helm.
Moving even further afield you can look at characters like Cortez or Christopher Columbus. I think it's safe to say that Discovery and colonization of the Americas by Europe would have happened 99.9% of the time without them, and in a pretty similar manner. They're essentially replaceable and colonial events were determined almost entirely by the technological differences between continents, and the prevailing social doctrine in Europe. Europeans were bound to discover the Americas, and had spent the prior several hundred years in a cage match practicing the technologies and social structures for warfare and conquest against each other.
> Moving even further afield you can look at characters like Cortez or Christopher Columbus. I think it's safe to say that Discovery and colonization of the Americas by Europe would have happened 99.9% of the time without them, and in a pretty similar manner.
I heartily recommend "Civilizations" by Laurent Binet. It's fiction, but oh so delicious. On this very subject.
This is a pretty shallow opinion imo. The government operates on violence. America was founded in a violent revolution. The question people are asking isn't about whether violence has its place (it does); it's about how bad things have to get before you stop considering your government to have a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, and people can start justly using violence themselves.
If the vast majority of the public actually agreed on something, they could non-violently change anything in days.
The allure of violence is that people mistakenly think that they make change without support, when in reality, they are usually just creating effects, not the change that they want.
Shooting a school or rioting has a lot of effects, but they almost never make the desired change.
This might be more persuasive if you supplied some examples.
Huge ask right at the beginning. If that is met, there are several examples such as The Velvet Revolution, Iceland's Financial Crisis Protest, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Philippine People Power Revolution (1986) etc.
1. They are in the right (no pun intended) group
2. All other groups are in the wrong
3. Their leader cares about them
4. He/she has the solution
1. Most of us are in the same group
2. The group is of screwed over people
3. The leaders only care about gaining and staying in power
4. Why would the leaders find any solution that won't help with gaining and staying in power?I’m not advocating for violence. On the contrary. But one has to wonder sometimes what percentage of the population has to work full time while not being able to afford basic necessities, until violence becomes an option
It would actually do the opposite - the great positive effects from those 20 Luigis would reduce the chance of such a thing occuring.
This brings back a potential disincentive, and is what has been incredibly sorely needed.
The French revolution is often brought up here as a case that is supposed to show that this kind of violence leads to horrific outcomes. This is ironic as on the whole, its results were fantastic. Reason being that it didn't just affect France - all over Europe, the monarchies were suddenly much more willing to restrain their power and care a lot more about the peasants.
This is exactly what is needed. This doesn't have to happen to every similar CEO to have an incredibly positive effect.
If you don't allow folks to seek justice in the courtroom, they'll inevitably return to "the jungle" so to speak.
It's our job as participants in society to do our best to avoid that, but we have to make changes. We can't be idle and wring our hands saying "it can't be helped" or "it's not illegal". We have to change things so that folks will be held accountable.
If we don't, this sort of thing is inevitable.
The reality is that the courts have long struggled to hold wealthy and white-collar criminals accountable—unless, of course, their actions harm other wealthy individuals, in which case the system can sometimes swing into action.
This issue isn't unique to the United States either; it’s a broader problem where the justice system often fails to address the crimes of the privileged while disproportionately impacting lower-income communities.
2) how many prosecutions do you think there are for shoplifting? I'm genuinely interested to know, and couldn't find it.
3) Even if you ignore this, the public cares a lot about shop lifting! you dont need a judicial capture conspiracy.
> I don't see the courts failing to uphold the law (save for the supreme court which fails to uphold the Constitution, but that doesn't weigh on the everyday person's life much, as we saw through the elections)
you may of course disagree, I'd like to hear your perspective.
Things are certainly worse, not just some minor political winds shifting.
On top of that, he's going to pardon everyone convicted for that insurrection, and wants to attack the Jan 6 committee somehow.
Good example: his Goodreads had "Introduction to Algorithms" in it. This is the de facto textbook at MIT, Stanford, etc and likely UPenn (where he got his undergrad and Masters). Does that mean he read it? Not necessarily.
Put it this way: the number of people who have read Knuth's volumes is a lot smaller than those who own them as essentially expensive bookends or paperweights. But it's a nice way to signal your technical chops.
All of these things need to be taken in a broader context.
Think crops like maize, pets like dogs (some breeds more so than others), etc.
https://old.reddit.com/r/climate/comments/10j1le5/has_anyone...
In contrast, how many man-hours went into investigating Mr. Thompson's assassination? The wealthy and powerful will sleep more soundly with the suspect under arrest, yet I still feel a bit nervous walking around my neighborhood after dark.
Is there even a question that we have a two-tiered justice system?
This is all totally consistent with OP’s charge that there is a two-tiered justice system. Personally, I would much rather see the man who murdered OP’s neighbor in jail than Luigi Mangione.
https://x.com/pepmangione - more of a reposter than a commenter, for example
* reposts link on mental health titled "Seasonality of brain function: role in psychiatric disorders"
* view on what's wrong with society: "I believe this book will go down in history as the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century." [Tim Urban's "What's Our Problem?"]
* [ironically] on intelligence, liking the quote "Being smart makes you more prone to confirmation bias"
* likes John Haidt's new book "The Anxious Generation"
etc
I wouldn't be surprised if he went on an adderall bender that he never recovered from. Adderall and rabbit hole topics without a resolution (societal change) are not a good mix.
Gave a 4 star review to the Unabomber manifesto!
quote from his review:
"Violence never solved anything" is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.""
He justifies Ted Kaczynski saying: "He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary."
The quote about "Violence never solved anything..." it turns out are not his words, they are part of him quoting someone else in his review; but I wasn't able to find the source of the long message he quoted; just news articles from the last few hours mentioning the quote.
EDIT: nevermind, found the origin of the quote on reddit r/climate: https://www.reddit.com/r/climate/comments/10j1le5/comment/j5...
Another notable GoodReads comment (from Luigi) regarding another book: "I love Steve-O. His life is full of wild stories, and his addictive personality is one I relate to. "
and his profile: https://web.archive.org/web/20241209181228/https://www.goodr...
Come on.
1. He wanted to get caught
2. This isn't him, and they're framing this guy
3. He figured the safest place to have that stuff was on his person, but then why go and get arrested at McDonald's? To be fair I don't know about that interaction.
I don't buy 3 because there were so, so many places to ditch shit between Altoona and Manhattan. The Susquehanna for starters.
(Although a brief perusal of the photos in the article doesn't show anything obviously different between them.)
Not saying it's impossible but in those cases they need to A) know who the real killer actually is, and B) kill/suicide the fall guy.
it was an employee at McDonalds. McDonalds solved this crime. Like god intended.
The point is, the NYPD was compiling evidence for the media to release. Part of that evidence nobody had included:
- the original surveillance video of the murder
- the video capture of him at the hostel (with his mask down)
- the video capture of him inside the cab after the murder with his mask
Without a decent photo, he probably would still be on the run. Had it not been for the NYPD releasing the images of him, the patron or employee would not have recognized him and called the cops.
The cops were closing in on him regardless. The photos being so widely circulated were a primary reason he got caught. He was probably forced to try and wear a mask to conceal his identity, but at the same time, doing so made me stick out enough that they called the cops.
Enough for a cab camera
> did a good bit of detective work to ensure the pictures they released actually were of the suspect in question
Do you remember the Boston Marathon bombings [1]?
I firmly believe it was an employee.
If the ice-cream machine was broken, then the likelihood is less and the employees may not have been involved.
It's all very logical.
There must be millions of people in the East Coast who look like that.
What are the odds that since case is high profile they probably used some grey area or illegal surveillance tool from their 3 letter agency friends and made up some story how a patron recognized him.
Convinently guy also had a copy of all the incriminatint stuff with him. (In russia he would also have sims3).
Since he talked on phone, they used some voice recognition software. They probably record all the calls and the system recognized him when he made a new one (or even worse - from someone elses' phone).
Then they used this whole doctrine of not revealing the real source.
Since he got caught alive this theory does not look plausible. Those guys who were to hire him would make sure that he will not be talking to police.
So when they said they knew who he was yesterday it was a lie.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5028239-mayor-adams-sa...
Given Adam’s past year, there was never a reason to take what he says at face value.
> When asked by a reporter if police had the suspect’s name, Adams said, “We don’t want to release that now. If you do, you’re basically giving a tip to the person we are fine with seeking, and we do not want to give him an upper hand at all. Let him continue to believe he can hide behind a mask.”
Grammatical flub aside ("the person we are fine with seeking"), he is just saying that he doesn't want to say anything about the info being requested. The police release information that they have decided is in their interest to release. Everything else is classified confidential by default.
I agree with this.
> and they know his name.
That is not implied anywhere at all.
To me that implies that they don't know who he is, because he is hiding.
Or, if we're being really charitable, they were chasing the wrong guy.
He's a cop turned politician.. cows moo, crocodiles chomp, and these critters lie. It's their nature.
Too late to edit, but it seems the implied /s here should have been explicit.
Edit: sorry, I was a bit snarky there and I shouldn't have been. I was in fact splitting a hair there; it's a useful one for me but it's far from obligatory.
Also continually uses strange phrases in speeches that he made up, like "all your haters will be waiters when you sit down at the table of success", or saying "New York City is the Dublin/Istanbul/Port au Prince of America" whenever he's talking to an a cultural group.
To give you one specific - he lied about accidentally firing a gun at school and then he claimed that a book that is available for purchase "never got to print."
https://apnews.com/article/eric-adams-book-gun-e2179cd82fc41...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unlocked-eric-adams/id...
My home contractors might lie to me, but that certainly is not what I hired them to do
I'm assuming your father did more than just tell tall tales.
We can argue against that fact without resorting to hyperbole and twisting reality ourselves
It's a lie. Call it a non malicious lie, sure, whatever. But it's still a lie. I swear. The bar is buried under the fucking ground. In the US, anyway.
Sometimes it works. (Most suspects turn themselves in for crimes they've committed. It's actually the exception when police need to go out to arrest a criminal suspect.)
For violent offenses, and especially for high-profile murder cases, they don't give the suspect the option of turning themselves in.
That seems a lot like the responsibility of the suspect? Like, if you're planning on shooting a high profile target in midtown Manhattan isn't the exit something to think about? Based on what information we might actually have, the shooter had plenty of carelessly missed opportunities to not be caught. Poor planning, in retrospect, is a choice.
Was an obvious lie ...was my first reaction.
If they did know the name - it could have been used to retrieve numerous photos - and other evidence. That said the accused person left several of their online profiles online . even a facebook profile !!!
I wouldn't be surprised if he went into psychosis after losing a lot of sleep and never really got back to stability.
Adderall and a passion rabbit-hole like societal change are a dangerous combination. The more deep you dive, the more disinterested people become with you, and the more disconnected you become with other people.
Did you ever deal with any of the paranoia?
"I'd rather be lucky than good!" Impressive that they do seem to have found the right guy, based on the documents in his possession, and this was apparently due solely to the one photograph of his face that the police found and released.
I also note that this guy apparently had back surgery a few months ago.
Government rewards are always fake. They never pay out. Ever. The one guy who made it possible to catch Chapo is still "waiting" for his payout. If you're going to be a snitch, I guess you need to do it for the principle of the thing, there won't be any cash in your future.
this is a really interesting idea
Customer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2zwqqr1ro
Employee: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/09/unitedhealth...
Very unlikely. That’s the most expensive $60k anyone ever collected. The person who made the call needs witness protection, immediately. He needs to start over and never go back to Altoona.
The assumption that Mangione can protect this person by saying, “He’s not a snitch, I told him to call me in,” relies on his having an ability to control the narrative while in custody… which is generally not the case.
I'd be worried about that too, but certainly better than using his actual ID. I've never tried, but I'm guessing it's not easy to get good fakes on short notice in strange cities and lots of people these days demand ID, even just to get a room for the night.
This is real life, not a Punisher comic. Democracy ain’t easy, and as soon as a hurdle appears people itch to find an easy workaround, but there’s no way around doing the hard work of fixing the system.
> This variation is similar to The Fat Man, with the additional assertion that the fat man who may be pushed is a villain who is responsible for the whole situation: the fat man was the one who tied five people to the track, and sent a trolley in their direction with the intention of killing them. In this variation, a majority of people are willing to push the fat man.[38] Unlike in the previous scenario, pushing the fat villain to stop the trolley may be seen as a form of retributive justice or self-defense.
No such direct relationship can be assumed about murdering a healthcare CEO
So, more trains with hundreds of thousands will topple over until the tracks are fixed.
Your healthcare system principles are the problem. Healthcare can't function the same way Automotive industry or Oil Wells work. Heck, it can't even work the same as Auto insurance. For moral reasons only, because profitability is great.
Hint: it doesn't. In fact, the only result I can imagine from this is the opposite. After all, UHC will probably need to pay their CEO (if anyone takes the job) more for a while, to overcome the risk of being murdered. So if CEO pay meant fewer claims being paid out, after this they'll probably pay out even fewer.
I am pointing out how silly that line of thinking is.
Have you ever seen The Dark Knight? There's this quote about sending a message.
Cool.
I would like to see for myself and avoid lurking in the darker corners of the internet to go find it myself. A quick search turned out nothing, but tableoid garbage enjoying the whole thing of speaking about it, but not sharing the sources.
The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences luigi mangione's last words lor DEC 09, 2024
The second amendment means I am my own chief executive and commander in chief of my own military. I authorize my own act of self-defense in response to a hostile entity making war on me and my family. Nelson Mandela says no form of viooence can be excused. Camus says it's all the same, whether you live or die or have a cup of coffee. MLK says violence never brings permanent peace. Gandhi says that non-violence is the mightiest power available to mankind. That's who they tell you are heroes. That's who our revolutionaries are. Yet is that not capitalistic? Non-violence keeps the system working at full speed ahead. What did it get us. Look in the mirror. They want us to be non-violent, so that they can grow fat off the blood they take from us. The only way out is through. Not all of us will make it. Each of us is our own chief executive. You have to decide what you will tolerate. In Gladiator 1 Maximus cuts into the military tattoo that identifies him as part of the roman legion. His friend asks "Is that the sign of your god?" As Maximus carves deeper into his own flesh, as his own blood drips down his skin, Maximus smiles and nods yes. The tattoo represents the emperor, who is god. The god emperor has made himself part of Maximus's own flesh. The only way to destroy the emperor is to destroy himself. Maximus smiles through the pain because he knows it is worth it. These might be my last words. I don't know when they will come for me. I will resist them at any cost. That's why I smile through the pain. They diagnosed my mother with severe neuropathy when she was forty-one years old. She said it started ten years before that with burning sensations in her feet and occasional sharp stabbing pains. At first the pain would last a few moments, then fade to tingling, then numbness, then fade to nothing a few days later.
The first time the pain came she ignored it. Then it came a couple times a year and she ignored it. Then every couple months. Then a couple times a month. Then a couple times a week. At that point by the time the tingling faded to numbness, the pain would start, and the discomfort was constant. At that point even going from the couch to the kitchen to make her own lunch became a major endeavor She started with ibuprofen, until the stomach aches and acid reflux made her switch to acetaminophen. Then the headaches and barely sleeping made her switch back to ibuprofen. The first doctor said it was psychosomatic. Nothing was wrong. She needed to relax, destress, sleep more. The second doctor said it was a compressed nerve in her spine. She needed back surgery. It would cost $180,000. Recovery would be six months minimum before walking again. Twelve months for full potential recovery, and she would never lift more than ten pounds of weight again. The third doctor performed a Nerve Conduction Study, Electromyography, MRI, and blood tests. Each test cost $800 to $1200. She hit the $6000 deductible of her UnitedHealthcare plan in October. Then the doctor went on vacation, and my mother wasn't able to resume tests until January when her deductible reset. The tests showed severe neuropathy. The $180,000 surgery would have had no effect. They prescribed opioids for the pain. At first the pain relief was worth the price of constant mental fog and constipation. She didn't tell me about that until later. All I remember is we took a trip for the first time in years, when she drove me to Monterey to go to the aquarium. I saw an otter in real life, swimming on its back. We left at 7am and listened to Green Day on the four-hour car ride. Over time, the opioids stopped working. They made her MORE sensitive to pain, and she felt withdrawal symptoms after just two or three hours. Then gabapentin. By now the pain was so bad she couldn't exercise, which compounded the weight gain from the slowed metabolic rate and hormonal shifts. And it barely helped the pain, and made her so fatigued she would go an entire day without getting out of bed. Then Corticosteroids. Which didn't even work. The pain was so bad I would hear my mother wake up in the night screaming in pain. I would run into her room, asking if she's OK. Eventually I stopped getting up. She'd yell out anguished shrieks of wordless pain or the word "fuck" stretched and distended to its limits. I'd turn over and go back to sleep.
All of this while they bled us dry with follow-up appointment after follow-up appointment, specialist consultations, and more imagine scans. Each appointment was promised to be fully covered, until the insurance claims were delayed and denied. Allopathic medicine did nothing to help my mother's suffering. Yet it is the foundation of our entire society. My mother told me that on a good day the nerve pain was like her legs were immersed in ice water. On a bad day it felt like her legs were clamped in a machine shop vice, screwed down to where the cranks stopped turning, then crushed further until her ankle bones sprintered and cracked to accommodate the tightening clamp. She had more bad days than good. My mother crawled to the bathroom on her hands and knees. I slept in the living room to create more distance from her cries in the night. I still woke up, and still went back to sleep. Back then I thought there was nothing I could do. The high copays made consistent treatment impossible. New treatments were denied as "not medically necessary." Old treatments didn't work, and still put us out for thousands of dollars. UnitedHealthcare limited specialist consultations to twice a year. Then they refused to cover advanced imaging, which the specialists required for an appointment. Prior authorizations took weeks, then months. UnitedHealthcare constantly changed their claim filing procedure. They said my mother's doctor needed to fax his notes. Then UnitedHealthcare said they did not save faxed patient correspondence, and required a hardcopy of the doctor's typed notes to be mailed. Then they said they never received the notes. They were unable to approve the claim until they had received and filed the notes. They promised coverage, and broke their word to my mother. With every delay, my anger surged. With every denial, I wanted to throw the doctor through the glass wall of their hospital waiting room. But it wasn't them. It wasn't the doctors, the receptionists, administrators, pharmacists, imaging technicians, or anyone we ever met. It was UnitedHealthcare. People are dying. Evil has become institutionalized. Corporations make billions of dollars off the pain, suffering, death, and anguished cries in the night of millions of Americans.
We entered into an agreement for healthcare with a legally binding contract that promised care commensurate with our insurance payments and medical needs. Then UnitedHealthcare changes the rules to suit their own profits. They think they make the rules, and think that because it's legal that no one can punish them. They think there's no one out there who will stop them. Now my own chronic back pain wakes me in the night, screaming in pain. I sought out another type of healing that showed me the real antidote to what ails us. I bide my time, saving the last of my strength to strike my final blows. All extractors must be forced to swallow the bitter pain they deal out to millions. As our own chief executives, it's our obligation to make our own lives better. First and foremost, we must seek to improve our own circumstances and defend ourselves. As we do so, our actions have ripple effects that can improve the lives of others. Rules exist between two individuals, in a network that covers the entire earth. Some of these rules are written down. Some of these rules emerge from natural respect between two individuals. Some of these rules are defined in physical laws, like the properties of gravity, magnetism or the potential energy stored in the chemical bonds of potassium nitrate. No single document better encapsulates the belief that all people are equal in fundamental worth and moral status and the frameworks for fostering collective well-being than the US constitution. Writing a rule down makes it into a law. I don't give a fuck about the law. Law means nothing. What does matter is following the guidance of our own logic and what we learn from those before us to maximize our own well-being, which will then maximize the well-being of our loved ones and community. That's where UnitedHealthcare went wrong. They violated their contract with my mother, with me, and tens of millions of other Americans. This threat to my own health, my family's health, and the health of our country's people requires me to respond with an act of war. END
The fantasy of jury nullification is still alive, but very unlikely to happen. If someone can turn the guy in, then someone could easily find him guilty.
There is a lot of debate to be had on whether or not this shooting is a good thing or not but "The CEO is innocent actually" is not it. You cannot be at the steering wheel of a steam roller that is currently in the process of crushing orphans and has been for years and then disclaim yourself of any responsibility.
This guy is going to end up in his hero Uncle Ted's old supermax cell where barely anything can go in or out.
Having the narrative set by a CEO murderer with double digit % cheering support in the entire US is not something the authorities will permit.
> Fixed over 300 UI bugs (25% of UI bug count) using Lua language, Jira software, and Perforce version-control system
I learned in Computer Ethics 101 about how the history of the development of radiological machines led to the realization that the ethical path to creating systems for our lives involves stopping using them when they accidentally/repeatedly harm.
I'm looking for different paths than murder to accomplish this. Anyone else want to get together around these ideas to start designing?
It seems like our entire system has been intentionally designed and refined over centuries specifically to ensure that nothing short of radical, even violent, acts will have any meaningful impact on those in power.
Corporations in particular have insulated themselves from any accountability whatsoever and there are literal serial killers who knowingly sold products and took actions that they knew would kill people who have never and will never see a single day behind bars.
I sure hope that programmers, hackers, computer scientists, or systems designers/engineers find some means to improve the situation, and I'd certainly support the effort but I'm far from optimistic.
Exactly: look at the people behind the Ford Pinto (with the exploding gas tank), and more recently the people behind the Boeing 737MAX.
But corporations are guided by human beings so, in the end, we have ourselves to blame. If making any accusation you'd best put a name or names to it and forgo accusing a corporation purely.
But that doesn't make corporations a bad thing. They have, quite the contrary, proven to be a wonderful economic construct, along with such tools as capitalism and insurance.
Largely, they have a lot more doctors, hospitals and MRI machines per capita than we do, and they pay their doctors less and require less education from them.
This is particularly safer in America because the #1 thing voters hate is anyone doing anything new. If you ever try doing anything new you'll immediately get voted out. That's what happened after the ACA passed.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282401/density-of-magnet...
The USA typically uses machines with higher magnetic field strength, which are more expensive but produce higher spatial resolution. These machines are based on large superconducting solenoid magnets.
In Japan, there are many MRI machines with lower magnetic field, which makes them much more affordable while still quite useful. Some of such machines even use ordinary permanent magnets, which have much lower upkeep costs compared to the large superconducting devices.
Sure. That's like telling me that if I want to win an Olympic gold medal, I should just do what Phelps does. It'll work, right?
Even those countries may only have metastable healthcare economics, and while it looks as if it works now it could fail in the future. In the short term.
> Largely, they have a lot more doctors, hospitals and MRI machines per capita than we do,
So you're saying that all we need to do is have more resources that we don't have more of?
We also have very high to impossible standards for training doctors, and our residency rotation program requires you to not sleep because it was designed by a literal coke addict.
The US has "certificate of need" laws saying you can't open a hospital unless all the nearby competitors allow it first. We could just not do that.
> Sure. That's like telling me that if I want to win an Olympic gold medal, I should just do what Phelps does. It'll work, right?
America is the #1 country at a lot of things. Surely you're not going to let Australia, Japan, the Netherlands etc beat you on this.
This is completely impossible. We're talking about America here: it's utterly impossible for America to look at other countries and just copy them. It doesn't matter how much sense it would make; if America has a choice between sticking with some brain-dead system (perhaps, a measurement system for instance), or adopting a very logical and sensible alternative that America didn't invent, America will stick with its own brain-dead system, and claim that the alternative somehow can't possibly work in America because America is "different" and "exceptional". The only way America will adopt something new and better is if it's invented in America.
Note: I am a law abiding citizen, don't raid me, lol...
In this case, the design was replicating that of a Glock 43 IIRC, which is already mostly plastic. Guns are modular of course, and so there's a part that's legally designated the firearm to avoid ship-of-Theseus problems. For the Glock that's the frame, which includes the handle. That part's made out of plastic (except for a metal plate that has the serial number and can be detected by metal detectors). Since the frame on the original gun is plastic, it's designed not to have much force put on it, so it's not a technically difficult 3d print either. In the US (federally; states may have further restrictions) it's not illegal to manufacture your own firearm as long as it's for your own use. All the other parts, like the barrel, trigger, etc (not the silencer though), are unregulated, so it's perfectly legal to 3d print your own or just buy them and have them shipped to your house. (There's also the concept of an "80% lower": at what point does a piece of metal become a gun? Generally it's held to be that before the gun's than 80% complete then it's just a piece of metal, so you can buy <80% complete guns with no regulation that include a jig and instructions for completing the last 20% work yourself to make a ghost gun at home. Selling any unregistered firearm is very legally fraught.) Silencers (aka suppressors) are heavily regulated and it's not legal for just anyone to make one, but if you're not concerned with longevity or legality you can make one out of plastic easily with a minimum of design work.
The Glock uses a tilting barrel system: the barrel and slide are joined by a set of lugs on the barrel that fit into recesses in the slide, and after the bullet is fired are pushed back together by the force of recoil. The slide slides on linear rails, but the barrel has a pivot, so eventually as the barrel and slide travel back together, the barrel will tilt out of the recesses in the slide and allow the slide to continue backwards, opening space between the barrel and slide for the previous round to be extracted and a new round to be loaded automatically. You can imagine that hanging a big heavy tube off the barrel in the form of a silencer can be detrimental to the working of this system. In fact, you're supposed to use a recoil booster to increase recoil while using a silencer on tilting-barrel pistols to ensure more reliable operation. It's unlikely that malfunctions were because any parts were 3d printed in this case.
Edit: Maybe only rifles have those?
"... channel was removed for violating YouTube’s impersonation policies, after the channel name and handle were updated on Monday following news of Mangione’s arrest to appear as if it belonged to the suspect. That channel on Monday posted a cryptic countdown video that said, “If you see this, I’m already under arrest.”
What was the content in those channels and why were they removed?
All other online footprint of this guy is still online (even his github!), what content was there on YT to grant it being removed?
Lack of transparency will just generate more questions and doubt.
Not true, Meta removed his Facebook and Instagram.
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/luigi-mangione-social-me...
I guess that's one way to get a LOT of clicks on your account.
random comment on said live premiere:
> the account is fake. the video wouldve been made public instantly. there would be no premire time. you can change your youtube handle. this account isnt linked to his x account
Here is a mirror of the short video linked in the OP (no real content, just a countdown and date): https://files.catbox.moe/jxtf97.mkv
Maybe he was thinking they would leave it up so police could use it as potential evidence.
I'd be shocked if someone used normal social media to distribute something like that. Meanwhile, drugs and warez and pirated content have developed a well known, well supported, internationally censorship resistant ecosystem.
Why would you not use that?
But according to another comment in the thread YT confirms they removed the fake account AND _three_ real accounts associated with the guy.
Begs the question of why did they remove those? What content was in the real accounts to grant removal?
Probably is fake, can someone decode the binary in the thumbnail? I can't ATM.
“This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.”
IMHO there ought to be restrictions and transparency on channel name changes because it gets abused all the time.
Perhaps should have submitted this article instead.
In Canada, their system has a number of major shortcomings. But in college when my girlfriend got appendicitis, I just took her to the hospital without worry about in/out of network, and without worrying about if we'd get a claim rejected after the fact and have our small college student bank accounts drained. That is huge, and should not be underestimated. Here I do not have that luxury. Even though I have plenty of money saved up, it doesn't ever feel like enough. If one of us has a major illness, it can get wiped out due to a claim denial. And who makes the approve/deny choice?
The author of that post does some bad thinking here by completely missing the source of the vitriol directed at insurers. While providers do charge out the ass, at least they are doing something useful, while in these times of great uncertainty and pain, insurers only rent seek, blood suck, and do not offer anything of value.
Not relative to the case of having no insurance.
You're implicitly blaming insurers for the fact that the US doesn't have universal public healthcare. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
But yes, I 100% agree with you. If the US wants to implement public healthcare, it should follow the EU's lead and implement it at the state level with very limited (if at all) top-down interference from the Federal government. Imo, the only thing that it makes sense to do at a nationwide level is negotiating drug prices.
To answer your (flawed) question though, humans have demonstrated time and time again that they struggle to top-down manage large economical undertakings at scale. It seems that at a small scale, we have the capacity to do all sorts of things with all sorts of means of management. But past a certain point we start to get in our own way with internal strife, graft, poor abstractions and assumptions, etc. Some people think AI will help us figure this out, but I'm skeptical. So far the only consistent tool that helps us work against this is the invisible hand of a free market, which does enough to align incentives that the problems become tractable.
That was my point: even if there is some hypothetical property of size where a national healthcare system would fall apart, which we have no reason to believe exists, letting each of the 50 states run their own should be similar to the European model where a larger population is covered by a variety of programs and that provides natural experiments for the efficacy of different approaches.
disaster is a strong word, but yes, it would definitely have issues. but would it be an improvement over what we currently have, for most people? that is the standard that matters.
no system will be perfect. i'd argue that no healthcare system will even be that good, knowing human nature, especially given the culture in the US which values the individual's right to obtain money over most everything else. but even given these facts, i think it's defeatist to think that this is honestly the best we can do.
My alternate proposal would be for states to implement public healthcare on their own, which they can already do.
And why do you think that a nationwide system (which by necessity needs to be vastly more complex) is more achievable?
I don’t know, but what does that have to do with my point?
> And why do you think that a nationwide system (which by necessity needs to be vastly more complex) is more achievable?
I never said that nationwide would be more achievable. I think both options would work.
I’m asking why you think public healthcare works for countries with 90 million inhabitants but doesn’t work for 330 million. What’s the thing that prevents scaling?
Even in the 50-90M range, healthcare systems start to show serious orchestration/efficiency/coordination issues. Healthcare is just the final boss of this type of thing, because everybody needs it and there actually isn't enough to go around.
Regardless yes, I think the US should definitely have states try to figure this out at a smaller scale before even thinking about trying to achieve it at a national level for 300+ million people. Added benefit that some friendly competition amongst states might actually help move things along.
But I still don’t see how the scaling would be worse than linear.
How is managing 300 million people more than 3 times harder than 100 million people? The effort per person shouldn’t increase, and everything common scale lower than linear.
Have you never worked in a large corporation before and seen all the intermediary layers of beauracy? If you have, imagine the largest company you've ever worked for, multiply it by 1000x, and then imagine but there is no profit motive driving efficiency (or competition) and your customers all demand access to a resource that is finite. Except they're not really "customers", so you can't say "sorry no more product left, better luck next time".
That is publicly funded healthcare at scale.
What "economies of scale" do you imagine centralized publicly-funded healthcare has?
It has been a while since I listened to these episodes, but my main recollection is the argument that insurers are the only entities in the system actually fighting to reduce costs (and, of course, high costs are what underlie most of the other problems with the US healthcare system).
To be clear, I don't think insurers (and United Healthcare in particular) and their owners (all of us with index funds in our retirement accounts?) and boards and executives are blameless, but I do think this idea should be more central to the discussion and less contrarian.
In the case of health insurance, driving up the costs requires a monopoly or collaboration of firms without defection. As a result, this means one firm cant act in isolation, and cost increases usually come from the industry not pushing back on outside changes that impact all the firms equally. Examples could be more training for healthcare workers, more expensive standards of care, more regulation and paperwork, ect.
It is pretty telling that UHC prices are not that different than similar plans at Kaiser (which is a vertically integrated non-profit insurance, hospital, pharmacy, and PBM provider). About 15% different when I was picking between them during open enrollment this year.
The health insurance industry is effectively a maximally hostile middleman. It's hostile to service providers, and it's hostile to service users. (The most charitable thing you can say about it is that it creates enormous amounts of paperwork, thereby creating jobs and boosting GDP.) It's not difficult to see how it has become so widely hated.
I have doctor friends who quote they spend over 60% of their time dealing with insurance and it's intricacies. It's the fault of the system, with large foundations on insurance and perverse government policy to enrich the leaders therein, and the providers are simply making do with the system they must operate in.
I'll never forget the story I heard about a military squadron that needed like one bolt to fix a relatively important piece of equipment, and it cost like $10 itself.
But the only way they could get it was through a package deal of a million dollars of other insane amounts of equipment that was entirely superfluous and they ended up getting shitloads too many guns and threw away thousands of hardware bits just to get that one screw.
Similar systems at play here.
As for the author's claim that the doctor/nurse/admin assistant should know how much your treatment costs beforehand, lol. Yes, in an ideal world they absolutely would tell you. No, in reality they do not know. There's a whole apparatus of administrators and software spanning the hospital and insurance companies with bajillions of codes and negotiated rates. Noah Smith instead thinks doctors/nurses/admin assistants know ahead of time what each treatment costs but decline to inform consumers? A slightly dated but still relevant book is O'Reilly Hacking Healthcare. Iirc there are whole chapters on billing. It's just very complicated to figure out costs before treatment, and that's the fault of insurance/administration, not doctors/nurses/admin assistants.
It at least implies 2 anti medical worker claims. 1) excess healthcare costs are driven by medical worker salaries 2) medical workers could clarify prices but do not in order to mislead patients. Both totally miss the real problems of healthcare cost: the complexity of admin/billing leads to not just increased costs in insurance companies but also in hospital administration, and obscures costs for patients.
Also, the quote from the Courtney Barnett song about Australian healthcare only applies if you somehow end up in a private emergency department, which is extraordinary unlikely since they're often underprepared for critical emergencies and for non-critical stuff you can ask to be taken to a public hospital in the ambulance. You're likely to get charged a couple of thousand dollars for the ambulance ride (depends on state; in mine, membership of the ambulance org is $53 a year and automatically covers you for any ambulance trip Australia-wide, no denials; others are free), plus a few hundred for the consultation. I believe Medicare will pay for some private care in an emergency department.
She's talking about calling 000 because of an asthma attack but also alludes to a panic attack, which means she's not rationally discussing how much it will cost. It's not a scenario where she will have actual crippling debt like it would be in the US. A non-artistic non-panic-attack analysis of the situation is that she'd pay literally nothing as a public patient in a public hospital, and would pay a few thousand in the unlikely possibility she got admitted to a private hospital. Which, yes, would suck, but her worst case is an order of magnitude or two away from the expected cost in the US.
I'd say, it's also true that this specific company UHG, specifically had policies in place that led to people dying over denied claims. The author of this piece himself said 10-20% of claims are outright, flatly denied by health insurance. That leads to a world where people die unable to afford healthcare they already paid for. I think both parties are at fault here, and yeah insurance is easier to be mad at, that's an idea that makes sense to me.
Is this before or after their CEO's 23.5 million compensation?
If the guy worked for free, it would have increased margin by about 0.002%.
I've asked this in a different thread, but I'll repeat it here: how much of the remaining "operational expenses" actually add meaningful value to the patients' healthcare?
Well they both are
Maybe that was wrong.
The US has historically been a safe space for the rich. There's never been anything like the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, or the Maoist revolution. The people in charge of the American Revolution were mostly well off. The US hasn't even had a period of high taxes intended to impoverish the rich, as the UK did after WWII.
Occupy Wall Street, the Reparations movement, and its predecessors, such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, went nowhere. Organized labor is barely alive in the private sector. Don't expect much from that direction.
There's the possibility that the coalition the incoming president created might go beyond what he intended and become a radical populist movement. That's happened in other countries when some rabble-rouser got the population wound up, then lost control of them.
Corporations will beef up security and keep doing what they were doing before. Police and government will increase surveillance budgets, citing this event as reasoning. And no one will interpret this act of violence as anything other than a random event to prevent.
You don’t get structural change by extreme singular events. That’s not how it works.
The word _singular_ is doing a lot of work there.
Historically 'propagande par le fait' has had a massive effect on policy.
The implication that you have to not only focus on EBITDA but also on social responsibility (in a real non-PR way) is ever lasting if this propagates to more than a single occurrence.
Which is why mainstream media and authorities are so worried about controlling the narrative of the events (depicting Brian as a loving father etc.)
What examples are you thinking of, exactly? When, precisely, did a person/group assassinate someone and have that act push forward their cause?
Which is why mainstream media and authorities are so worried about controlling the narrative of the events (depicting Brian as a loving father etc.)
Or, maybe the idea that killing a random healthcare CEO and acting like that will solve the healthcare disaster is a childish idea that belongs in a movie like The Purge or a Marvel film?
The world isn't that simple. It's incredible that people have such a one-dimensional moral worldview.
We have trials to apply justice because it's not always clear who did what and it would be terribly unjust to lock someone up for something they didn't do.
The answer is: none. This wasn't some elaborate ethical act, nor is the pathetic justification of it online. It is boring old mob mentality, combined with class resentment and a number of other things.
Imagine someone murders your brother. They are friends with the judge so they are let to walk. Have you been denied justice?
Again, the reason not to shoot people on the street is not because it is always unjust but because its not always clear what is just and we would like a fair consistent way to decide that, in a way that's legible to other people.
If you think the death penalty is fair, then you admit that you are fine with people being killed in the name of justice. The only question is, is the person the one who did the crime. Normally a judge would decide that but I don't see why that's a prerequisite
And there's still the question of exactly what culpability a CEO of a major insurance corporation actually has, what supposed crime he has committed, and what the appropriate punishment should be. As far as I can tell, pretty much no one applauding this act has any real understanding of how corporations actually work, or what this specific CEO did that warranted him being murdered. As I said above, there is no intelligent defense here. It's just populist street violence.
It devolves if its unclear, or someone takes it too far and then there's a reprisal etc.
And to use the recent situation as an example: no one other than the shooter decided that the victim was guilty, or what his punishment ought to be.
That's why its illegal and I agree it should be illegal.
I personally feel like the CEO was guilty and the punishment was deserved. That it was just. Based on what I've heard, a lot of other people agree too.
This is irrespective of whether the prescident is good etc. All I'm trying to say is that this is what the guy deserved and its a failing of our government that these types live as lavishly as they do on our backs. That is unjust. We willingly trade some justice for social stability and that's a good thing and I hope there's not follow ups to this with more sympathetic targets. I don't want to be subjected to everyone's conflicting ideas of justice.
I'll ask you this before continuing to argue:
Can you imagine any situation where the courts are not willing or able to supply justice? Is there any other country or hypothetical country where the courts are corrupt enough that something could happen outside of the courts and you would approve? Should one ever trade political stability for justice?
Effective US Corporation tax was as high as 50% post WWII. Effective income taxes were between 70% and 90%.
US culture has long actively reviled and denied power to aristocracy.
The story that the rich are in physical danger is used by Trump's supporters to create a paranoid victim mentality among the wealthiest and most powerful. (America - anyone can be a victim!)
What? Do they mean Firaxis? Devs of some Civilization and X-Com versions?
He unfortunately sounds very similar to people like you and I here on Hacker News, rather than what we all had in mind about his possible persona.
Those types of people?
The sum of requests for insurance money is far greater than the total amount an insurance company brings in. Denials will need to happen, and I do not have the ability to judge whether a denial was appropriate or inappropriate in a vacuum.
There were actually some leaked memos, that made it clear that the goal of many denials -especially irt AIDS, because nobody likes gays and addicts- was to hasten or cause the death of the patient (thus, decreasing the cost). If a hospital can't guarantee payment, they won't do the surgery/treatment, so the insurer definitely knows that their action will likely kill the patient. In fact, that's the goal.
I would consider that first-degree, premeditated, murder.
I understand that they are now turning the denials over to AI, so that actual humans don't have to live with the knowledge that they deliberately killed someone else.
But it isn't cool to just kill folks you don't like. The kid needs to be tried for first-degree murder. I do not condone his action, and I'm glad they got him. I just wish they were as circumspect, when it came to the murder of non-CEOs.
I was just commenting that it will be very difficult to find an impartial jury. There's definitely a downside to pissing off every single person in the US.
> 5D chess: UHC Brian Thompson assassination represents the ideological victory of Right accelerationism bc they already argue a built-in feature of monarchy (CEO dictatorship) is that when it isn’t working well you can just kill the king. Many seem to agree?
Medical PPO (All states) and HMO (CA only) Aetna PPO Aetna HMO (CA only) Kaiser HMO (CA only
Granted, you'd need to be in a very dark place, but it doesn't take the greatest stretch of the imagination to create a hypothetical scenario in which someone just thinks to themselves "Well shit, I guess I don't have too many options here, and the only thing stopping me is the tacit acceptance that I shouldn't use violence". People do have addresses after all, and perhaps should be more afraid than they are of screwing people at a large scale.
Also, this is a quibble, but I don't think he saw the CEO "die in agony": he fired his 3 shots (with some difficulty because of the particular way the gun and suppressor worked), and then took off to get his bicycle. The CEO later died in the hospital.
This CEO may as well have pulled the trigger.
---
Some illnesses are hard. But even so, they are temporarily bad. You suffer some time, get some treatment or procedure and then it's -mostly- over. You may lose something in the process, but generally you can go on with your life after it.
Sometimes there are permanent effects. Like maybe you lose an eye, or maybe you have to be medicated for the rest of your life, or have to keep a special diet or something. Or you may get some permanent discomfort. But again, even with this, you can generally continue otherwise "well enough".
Some other illnesses are hard, and lethal. You may suffer, go through some process -or not- and then die. These are hard to endure because, well, you know you're dying. But then again, it happens fairly quickly.
Some other illnesses can be hard and recurring. Like a cancer or lymphoma. The treatment is hard and exhausting. But you go through it and it either works and you get some additional years to live fairly ok, or it doesn't work and you rapidly go away. Then they return and you repeat the loop. But again, you mostly live mostly ok some years and then get hit again, go through treatment and then the fork of either having some years more or dying "quickly".
Some are constantly hard. In the sense that they don't kill you but make you live with constant and relentless suffering. The psychological impact this has is hard to overestimate and while you don't die, it can be said that they take you life because they change it so completely that you have almost nothing else but fighting constantly against the pain and suffering.
When you are the subject yourself of such a situation, the effect can be devastating. Different people react differently, of course, but there's always some psychological damage. This can sometimes produce its own neurological illnesses that pile on top of it all.
But you may not be the subject of such an illness and still suffer the psychological impact. If you're a person that cares and someone close to you falls into that situation it's very easy to be affected. You won't experience it first-hand but you will see a person you love suffering every single day. It's worse when it also happens at night. Because then they will suffer and they will be significantly impacting their own health through sleeping badly or not sleeping at all. And if you're close enough to be there, chances are you will also sleep badly and affect your own health too.
Sometimes the situation means that you really can't do shit about it. Sure, you can be there, give them support, your love, your care, etc. And that is indeed a lot. But it has no particular effect on the illness itself so it can easily feel worthless, pointless, useless. The psychological effect of all this is both subtle, in the sense that you may not even be aware of it, and fairly impactful, producing changes in your personality and mental health.
Sometimes, other circumstances work together with the illness for the caring person to have to make big sacrifices. Like maybe quitting their job or career, or their own family or friends, or whatever. Sometimes they end up developing their own maladies because of this situation -or sometimes apparently because of it-.
And so, a person who is generally healthy gets to see someone they care for suffer continuously every moment of their life, and they are forced to renounce big parts of their own life to care for them, and then they are impacted with subtle but deep psychological problems. The description of "it breaks your heart" is quite appropriate because you may be giving all your love and effort while simultaneously feeling completely useless, and end up inflicting hard damage on yourself.
Different people will react differently to all this. But it's hard to predict how any of us would react until you've actually gone through it. Sure, you can say "I'd seek help" or "I'd try to stay positive" or even "I'd certainly go crazy", but the truth is you don't actually know.
For some people it's not uncommon to react by looking for an "ultimate cause", something they can attribute all the problems to. It can be a generic cause like "life sucks" and they may end up bitter against life in general. Some turn religious. Some do the opposite. Or it may be that they find fault on something they did or didn't and so they end up blaming themselves, with various outcomes. It may also be that they blame another close person, a parent, a sibling, and it's not uncommon to see families split over such illnesses. Sometimes they may find a cause in "the system", in a negligent doctor, in an "uncaring" administration, in causes with different degrees of distance and specificity.
The problem has many aspects contributing to it and each person, again, will react differently. But sometimes it just happens that this one person under the accumulated effects of suffering, of seeing someone not die but live in agony every moment, finds this "ultimate cause" personified on some organization or some one specific person who can maybe -in reality or in their reality- have caused that pain or have profited from it or whatever, through their actions or inactions. With enough persistence, it's not hard for all of that to transform into rage or hate and, sometimes, produce the effect you see here.
I'm not saying this reaction is inevitable, or logical, or forgivable, or anything. That's up to you to think. Just that it's not impossible to understand and that there may be circumstances that push people... that crush people and them push them into tragic actions.
Finally, yes, I agree with the conclusion that it's terribly sad. In a lot of ways.
Right, we should all continue grumbling about it for the rest of our lives as law and government intended. Nothing will change and the meat grinder will continue churning. Imo, this line of thinking of "they're angry and upset in a way that upsets me!" is easily exploitable towards complete inaction.
Also I'm so sorry but having sympathy for effective oligarchs? Come on. Wishing their death might be a bridge too far but at best these people deserve ambivalence, not pity.
I'd like to call it "prep school scumbag syndrome". Trump is actually a good illustration of a related fact that hereditary rich who are content with being hedonistic assholes are much less harmful than the same in search of impact and meaning.
To fix it, we need new rule - if, adjusted for median same-ages pairings, you have/make less money than expected compared to your parents, you don't get to participate in politics in any way! Just kidding (sorta).
Notably, the slain CEO appears to have been from a working class family and a university of nowhere, and worked his way up. This is the kind of person I, personally, admire.
https://archive.is/2024.12.09-230659/https://breloomlegacy.s...
Sounds like both he and his mother were suffering from chronic pain and UHC dicked them around and refused to act in good faith
Edit: also worth noting that whatever this is, it's not the document he had with him when he was arrested, since that apparently contained[0] the following excerpt, while this doesn't
> “These parasites had it coming,” one line from the document reads, according to a police official who has seen it. Another reads, “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/09/us/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian...
> Something seems to have changed in recent months. Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend had suffered chronic back pain and texted him images after getting surgery before going “radio silent” over the summer. Asked in court if he was in contact with family, Mangione said “until recently.”
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/luigi-mangione-unite...
[0]https://breloomlegacy.substack.com/p/the-allopathic-complex-...
This might be a bug in substack? If you go to https://substack.com/@breloomlegacy it says "Profile not found", so they might've tried to scrub it
maybe some cache ttl hasn't run out yet or something :/
Not that it would stop a really determined copy-cat from taking notes from Luigi Mangione.
Here’s a description of the actual manifesto from the NYT:
> The 262-word handwritten manifesto that the police found on Luigi Mangione begins with the writer appearing to take responsibility for the murder, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. It notes that as UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not. “To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” he wrote. The note condemns companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
> The handwritten manifesto found on Mangione contained the passages “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/09/nyregion/unitedhealt...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/nyregion/who-is-luigi-man...
Also I don’t doubt that his mother would lack healthcare desperately even when wealthy. Women in pain are one the biggest demographics of denied healthcare. Even extremely wealthy, well-connected women.
How absolutely insane does that sound?
My buddy was a pro hockey player. He retired and a few years later, he blew out his knee. He didn't have insurance and was in a lot of pain every day. He knew he couldn't afford a 25K bill for surgery so he got on a plane, flew to Argentina, got his surgery done, stayed for two weeks and flew back. The whole ordeal cost him around 8K for the whole deal.
Instead of plotting to kill the CEO of some healthcare company, he found a solution to his problem instead.
This is the difference between this guy and thousands of other people who are in chronic pain. Some smoke weed, some find treatments in other countries, some find homeopathic remedies and many other combinations therein. They don't just go off the deep end and plot to murder someone because they felt so wronged by a health care company.
What has he accomplished by doing what he did? Nothing. There's already been a video of the new CEO to employees about how they intend to stay the path of denying necessary treatments and expenditures. All of that pent up hate and anger and instead of channeling that into doing something positive for himself and his mother, he just took out on the CEO of a company instead.
Doctors fear of malpractice and pressure to fit in as many billable moments in a day means that there's really no deep "engineering" of someone's problems that doesn't fit neatly into their mental diagnostic flow chart. So it's presented as needing expensive diagnostic work, to which the insurance companies also put up their hoops. And doctors are also not trained in nutrition and its effect on chronic illness such as this shooter's mothers.
So what it ends up feeling like is that if only the insurance companies were efficient, we could have an efficient route to hope while the insurance companies block such efforts.
Healthcare in America is one of those areas where unintuitive solutions are needed, and I would argue that it starts at the lifestyle prevention level before it even gets to the medical doctors and insurance companies.
What the actual fuck.
Look up neuropathy. I know someone suffering from it.
> What has he accomplished by doing what he did?
He accomplished that this particular CEO no longer goes to bed smugly each night, resting in wealth, while profiting of the suffering of others. It also made social media fun as it hasn't been in a long, long time. It's bringing all sorts of people together, wondering if they might not be so different after all. It's also causing a lot of people to get tattoos.
Probably more importantly, it causes all sorts of people to come out with stories about their or their loved ones' experiences with the health care system in the US.
Then there are all the news pieces where people in golden cages express shock at the pesky rabble celebrating. The pesky rabble notices and discusses that, too. They particularly notice the hypocrisy, how their lives are worth nothing, and how they once again are told what to think.
It put little a crack in the scheme of riling poor people up against each other, where there was no crack at all before.
What did your buddy achieve? He fixed his problem for 8k dollars which is still insane considering health should not be for profit. And if he wouldn't have have had 8k, he maybe would have just stayed in pain with a weed addiction, but at least he didn't become a murderer. Good for him, but if he wants to sit here and judge this dude for losing it after what his mother went through, let him speak for himself maybe.
invoking "bootstraps" unironically in this exact, specific context is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever, ever seen
This reads very “I have black a black friend, so I can speak on race issues”.
He's already said he would never support what he did, regardless of what happened to him or how he was treated.
>> Would he approve of you using him as an example of why an elderly woman with a severe, largely untreated nervous system chronic illness, which cannot be solved by any one procedure domestically or abroad, should just fix herself somehow?
He's already told multiple people in multiple conversations I've been around him that he felt compelled to leave the country to get treatment because the system is so broke here. I don't need his approval or permission to use his experience.
Its been widely reported the shooters family is wealthy. With such financial resources, both the shooter and his mom could've easily sought treatment elsewhere, but did not. Apparently people don't like the idea that life is hard and sometimes caring for your loved ones isn't easy, is time consuming and takes a lot of energy to endure.
Its clear the shooter decided he didn't have the constitution to do something different and instead of taking the decision process out of UHC's hands and do something himself to help his family, he merely acquiesced to what UHC was doing until he decided he needed to murder the CEO of the company.
>> This reads very “I have black a black friend, so I can speak on race issues”.
"Those who preach about tolerance and acceptance rarely, if ever, practice it themselves."
Thanks for confirming this is your level of discourse.
But you are using his experience to justify your own positions. I’m just pointing out that you’re merely speaking from authority that you don’t have just because you know some guy. That’s your dismissal speaking from a position of assumed knowledge you don’t actually have.
Also, it’s strange you consider polite disagreement to be intolerance. I’m not shooting you or advocating violence, I’m merely saying I think your logic is dumb. That you seem to equate the two the level of discourse you are bringing, not me.
You could order MRIs for every back pain complaint, which would improve outcomes for some % of patients, while probably worsening outcomes for others (due to red herring findings that lead to unnecessary treatments), but at what cost? Who will bear this cost? Regardless of health care system, someone will have to. Most back pain self-resolves with home care, so it makes sense to try that first, unless you have reason to suspect severe trauma that needs immediate treatment (e.g. the patient just fell off a ladder).
https://peterattiamd.com/stuartmcgill/
What you'll find with imaging for those structures is that many patients appear to have abnormalities or apparent pathologies, including patients who don't have any pain. So while MRI can be helpful for diagnosis and treatment it isn't necessarily definitive.
There is always going to be a resource allocation and care rationing issue with expensive services like MRI. Other countries with socialized healthcare often have long queues for non-emergency MRIs. In fact, we often see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists to skip the queues.
He could have help on the outside to post things also.
I was suspicious from the link and “last words” BS and even moreso with the cringe gladiator references. Typical weirdo fan fan material.
Sensations of tiny zaps all over my body 24/7, most noticeable when falling asleep. Ibuprofen helped a bit, fortunately it went away after a few months.
Holy shit this would leave a scar on anyone. I couldn't even imagine the emotional pain this causes.
Not saying this justifies murder but what would you do if a close loved one was screaming in agony daily and there's nothing you can do about it because the insurance company is blocking treatments?
I agree that murder is not a solution, but the reality is that we need a real health care system.
What an interesting coincidence that he developed a medical condition that wakes him with screaming as well.
It really sounds like he has hEDS. Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos (hEDS) can cause Small Fiber Neuropathy and back pain, as well as poor healing from surgery. It’s also more common in engineering type people, higher IQ, ADHD, anxiety disorder etc
It’s probably the most under-diagnosed condition in general. It’s also autosomal dominant. Can present as psychosomatic - gaslighting from doctors is typical.
It’s a shame more people don’t know about it because there are ways to effectively treat it - it’s an area where patient communities are far ahead of the medical community. So this could be a failure on two fronts, a failure of insurance but even if they had unlimited coverage there still would have been a failure in treatment.
It’s probably the most under-diagnosed condition in general. It’s also autosomal dominant. Can present as psychosomatic - gaslighting from doctors is typical.
It’s a shame more people don’t know about it because there are ways to effectively treat it - it’s an area where patient communities are far ahead of the medical community. So this could be a failure on two fronts, a failure of insurance but even if they had unlimited coverage there still would have been a failure in treatment.
I wonder why that is?
You have no idea how bad it can get.
No, surely it's made up. Nevermind: how foolish was I...
Chronic pain really takes you somewhere else mentally. Now that I am, for the time being, on the other side of it, it has also made me extremely empathetic to people who suffer through it.
"Nothing you can do about it" is just a lie people tell themselves to justify violence.
I do believe, though, that there is a vast spectrum of behaviours in between non violent inaction and an isolated random killing, that make a lot more sense in every way and that is called politics.
Are you a bot?
It's quite entertaining though that this particular conspiracy theory is catnip to HN users. Perhaps it's for the same reason it's blowing up on twitter: vague enough to capture the imaginations of people who might be imagining wildly different concrete scenarios?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you won't do this in the future.
The police showing up for a random tip in the boonies in PA fast enough to actually catch the guy at McDonalds and he just happens to have method and motive on him 5 days later seems too convenient. I think they ultimately got the right guy, but I don't think the 'tip' was a phone call from a McDonald's employee.
More plausible in my opinion than the FBI having some kind of agreement with McDonald's to access their store surveillance network in real time.
We have the DEA and other three-letter agencies stashing cameras all over highways and even in residential areas.
We have mass surveillance of communications.
We have license plate readers everywhere.
We literally carry tracking devices everywhere we go.
Our cars also have their own tracking devices.
Facial recognition(and probably other recognition tech like gait) is widespread.
We have systems that can mass surveil entire cities from the sky.
And these are just the confirmed systems that we know about.
Parallel construction is frequently used and it's not even a secret at this point.
That said, don't underestimate the ability of a criminal, even a smart one, to screw up. As a group of smart engineers, we all know too well that even smart people make mistakes. They make even more mistakes when they're operating outside of their domain and under pressure/nervous. It shouldn't be surprising that the perp got caught.
Sorry but they are. That's not me saying that. That's pretty much the entirety of human civilization. It's nice to think otherwise, but we as a species have made it clear that people are far from being equally important.
Same way they said an active GitHub while the repo is the opposite of that.
If your argument is "This is weird because of X and Y and Z" but Z is false and Y is unsubstantiated then it breaks the argument.
And among those are also the ones with real influence and power to promote and/or enforce them.
This seems pretty reasonable, but once you start to get to know people a bit...
IQ tests are a single dimensional psychometric measurement tool that when if administered correctly only measures some attributes of what would be considered intelligence.
While those skills correlate to your ability to perform as a engineer it doesn't always translate to aptitude towards this sort of crime.
There are plenty of people who will score poorly in IQ tests but are "street smart". the good criminals (i.e. those have a long successful run or never get caught) are of this category.
For example Al Capone never got caught tied to any of his actual crimes, he had intimate understanding of the legal system and how not to get tied to evidence, he wouldn't score over 130 in IQ test probably
A smart n00b is still a n00b.
The overall general public? Sure.
People with STEM graduate degrees? Maybe not so much.
Why would that be "insulting"? HE was supposed to be flirting, not necessarily her.
Plus, even if both were flirting, there's nothing insulting about that.
But, as the shooting in the street and the cheering on the Internet have shown (and the price gouging before that), our society has been coarsening along a great many dimensions.
Also you would want to carry a weapon in a manhunt only if you intend not to be caught alive, because firing your weapon in a manhunt would only end in one way for the hunted.
It's just too high profile, everybody would be on the case, all the experts in everything.
...."Active" GitHub?
If you look at his Twitter account, he disappeared a few months ago and all the replies were friends asking where he went.
(Also, he's a tpot poster, which is a kind of tech bro that likes tweeting about how great it is to do psychedelic drugs. This is bad for your mental health!)
>how did you decide his iq was >130?
he threw his life in the dumpster and will spend the next 30 years in a 2x2 cell. smart guy indeed.
Besides that though, the ethos that we have lends itself well to acquiring advanced knowledge in more-or-less all domains, crime and forensics included.
The solve rate for murders of white people is generally in the 80+% range, which is probably what you'd want to use if going after CEOs.
There is a high correlation between being a non-white murder victim (in America) and being targeted by or involved in gang violence.
Gang violence seems to be less moderated by the police, for probably a variety of reasons both practical and political.
But yes, if you aren’t killing a rival gang member, you do probably have worse odds than the overall stat.
- Gang-related homicides includes the homicides of innocent bystanders of gang-related shootings.
- Over half of all homicide victims are non-white.
These three facts make it obvious that well above 60% of all non-white homicides are NOT “gang-targeted or -involved”.
If it is true that 80% [EDIT: not true (I misread stat in another comment) but gist of argument still stands] of non-white cases go unsolved, then more than 50% of all unsolved non-white homicides are NOT gang-related in any way.
And this is an extremely conservative estimate. Just fixing unfavorable rounding adjusts the percentage of unrelated unsolved homicides to above 65%.
Given that, it doesn’t seem wise to presume gang-involvement on the part of non-white unsolved homicide victims solely on the basis of them being… non-white unsolved homicide victims.
It's not nearly that bad. Around 40-50% are solved. There are around 30% more non-white homicides than there are white homicides per year in the US, which means that the overall homicide solve rate is closer to the non-white solve rate than to the white solve rate.
Related parties are easy to name and find, unrelated murderers which you don't find immediately are only going to get harder to catch - where do you even start when with something like that?
Nice just-so argument.
Any basis in fact? Stats maybe?
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29836/1/Why_are_there_so_many_Engi...
I think it's related to old physicist brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's field.
You can imagine that engineering is a useful skill for terrorism and thus terrorist organizations might spend extra effort trying to recruit engineers. They may also have a higher survival rate working on behind the scenes tasks rather than firefights and suicide missions, which could cause a survivorship bias in data collection.
(It's also interesting how many foreign leaders and dictators have engineering or science degrees, and/or went to US universities prior to becoming leading figures in their home countries.)
Seems more likely you learn about engineers who become terrorists because they have the tools/knowhow/resources to pull something off. Without that it seems like it is more likely to get caught, give up, or do something no one would label terrorism.
edit - and it seems likely that this stat encourages terrorists organization to send members to get those degrees and recruit from engineers so it might be self reenforcing to boot.
The idea is that you get a lot of elites which are highly educated and expect high positions in society, but end up bitter because reality falls short. Engineers break with this because in general they are actually quite well compensated.
The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees
From Wikipedia: >Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
Im focusing on the USA, where engineers, STEM, and the like have high social standing, and do relatively well economically. Your "scholarship on the subject" is from 2007 and is from before the term elite overproduction was even coined.
The perhaps concerning thread socially is the rise of utilitarian and consequentialist morality.
°I guess because it's too easy to make calculation errors that lead to major badness?
Reminds me of the Salem Hypothesis.
Most murders wouldn't have this much resources dedicated to it though.
>Besides that though, the ethos that we have lends itself well to acquiring advanced knowledge in more-or-less all domains, crime and forensics included.
I wouldn't give too much credit to law enforcement. Perpetrators need to get it (opsec/disposal of evidence/etc.) right every single time, sometimes for decades. Law enforcement only needs to get it right once. And yet, clearance rates for murder are still pretty low.
> Among homicides in which the relationship could be determined, between 21% and 27% of homicides were committed by strangers and between 73% and 79% were committed by offenders known to the victims
Another data point is that the recidivism rate for murder is incredibly low, roughly 2% [2], among the lowest of any crime.
The point is that the vast majority of murders are personal in nature. Police will tell you that when someone dies, it's always the spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend as the prime suspect until it isn't. Murders with no personal relationship (eg serial killings) are quite rare.
So if you, as a software developer, want to get away with murder you first have to be irrational and/or insane enough to murder people for pretty much no reason, which will get you pretty far to not getting caught, but still want to murder people you really have no reason to.
You can further increase your odds of not getting caught by not leaving a crime scene or a body but also picking a victim who won't necessarily be missed. It's why serial killers end up preying on runaways and prostitutes. There's also the MMIW phenomenon [3]. Lastly, going outside your geographical area would further help your odds.
This suspect allegedly had no relationship to the victim but they still had a reason (it seems). Now it so happens that being upset about private health insurance quite literally would leave police with millions of suspects. But the point is, they weren't necessarily acting rationally even if it was premeditated and planned.
I still find it insane that the suspect didn't rid himself of every identifiable possession. Had they done that, I think they'd have a shot at acquittal (depending on DNA evidence from the water bottle and/or coffee cup). Now? Almost impossible.
As much as we talk about jury nullification, people like there to be something to hang their hat on in terms of doubt. If a blurry partial photo was the only evidence I could see that as being way more likely. Having the ID used in the hostel and the mask, bag and clothes as well as the gun makes that harder to justify.
[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf
[2]: https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/a-new-lease-on-lif...
[3]: https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-w...
Ummm.... You understand that the software developer was just caught by a McDonald's cashier?
On that point, Zeynep Tufekci once again shows to me how she has the most insightful analysis (I became a big fan of her during Covid, I thought she had the most measured takes). I totally agreed with what she wrote in https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/opinion/united-health-car...
Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh got destroyed in their comments when they tried to make this into a "look how evil the left is" issue, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bimRF1K3Bzw , and note his YouTube comments are usually very supportive. The contrast in the audience reaction to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agu2gRzUSDY , his commentary on the Daniel Penny case, is stark.
I can't determine who is downvoting/commenting on the video, but I know for sure the speaker is a right-winger.
Daniel Perry video doesn't blame anyone. And most people, even on the left (though definitely not everyone), seem to have a normal reaction to the outcome.
I am surprised that more people don't know this type of brigading to influence public opinion. Left-wing brigades are orchestrated on private Discord servers. Smaller right-wing brigades are orchestrated on private Telegram channels.
The left-wing brigaders pretending to be right-wing CEO-killing-supporters could have gotten away with it if they had limited themselves to populist MAGA spheres.
However the Ben Shapiro fanbase are boring middle of the road pro-capitalist/neocons who would never support killing CEOs. Pretending to be his fanbase was their fatal mistake.
looks like he followed/retweeted rogan, trevor noah, ezra klein, elon, AOC, rfk jr, peter thiel, bernie on twitter. very concerned with falling birthrates, anti-capitalist but pro musk, supports AI, dislikes overwatch but is a pokemon enjoyer. eats mcdonalds but is super ripped, gave positive reviews to ted kaczynski's manifesto as well as jd vance's hillbilly elegy
I'd say that to hold anti-capitalist ideals while liking Musk is reconciled through varying lenses. Musk can be idolized for his impact on the environment and moving various initiatives forward such as self-driving. One could argue that Musk is capitalist, but it could also be argued that Musk would drive these "good" initiatives even in a non-capitalist structure, thus the respect.
I'm not supporting musk, but merely illustrating how a certain level of rationalization can take place, counter to your insinuation that "opinions may not be thought through." It's the same thinking that also gives way when understanding the psyche behind various voters in this recent election.
This crime could have been solved the exact same way in the 1980s. The only difference being that the guy's picture would have been distributed over the 6 o'clock news instead of the internet.
And they also made use of other tech, like the fact that the Citibike has GPS.
Sure thing. They would know what the guy who kinda look like a photo of a wanted man is called. Doesn’t necessarily means they can pin anything on him. Obviously increases their chances, since they can work both backwards and forwards, but that is about it.
Assuming of course that the “he got just unlucky, a random person recognised them” is true, and not paralel construction for some other mean they don’t want to reveal.
\s murder is wrong
Waaay back in the late-80s, I was at an underground dance party. Some dude shot and killed another dude in the parking lot. At least a dozen witnesses saw it (I only heard it). Everyone knew the identities of both people involved. No arrests were ever made. I saw the dude on the street a few years later, walking around like he never shot and killed someone - thanks to the fine work of the Modesto PD.
There's some people on bluesky analyzing which Baltimore high school he went to too, but I don't think I should link small personal accounts here.
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/criminal-justic...
Although I personally believe Americans have a different class consciousness, where they think it's the working class and upper class billionaires allied together against annoying upper-middle class professional people like, uh, us.
The American elite do (and have always) taken steps to insulate themselves from the rest of the system, including medically. There are "boutique doctors", "family physicians" and the like.
Think of it this way: do you want your political enemies to start thinking, "Hey, I bet I could get away with assassinating that activist/politician"? Personally, my disdain of the American Healthcare complex is overruled by my opposition to normalizing political assassinations.
Now the media did bring it to international attention partially because he was rich and had some power. But the main thing really was because he worked on healthcare which everyone is pissed off about in the US.
There might be an issue if murders in general were going uninvestigated. Realistically it’s more that you just don’t see it happen.
Would they have burned millions in overtime? No.
Huh, what does this have to do with it? Of course, discriminatory comments like these that segregate people on race are never flagged on HN as long as it's against "the usual suspects".
[...]
You may look like we do, talk like we do
But you know how it is
[Chorus]
You're not one of us, not one of us
No, you're not one of us
Not one of us, not one of us
No, you're not one of us
You were, I felt, robbing me of my rightful chances
My picture clear, everything seemed so easy
And so I dealt you the blow, one of us had to go
Now it's different, I want you to know
Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us
Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us
And there isn't anything "confusing" about his statement. It is immoral to make profit by denying people life saving medical treatment. health insurance companies should have NEVER been allowed to be for-profit.
At the end of the day it's just sad for everyone involved.
But there really is no doubt that our current US healthcare system is a complete failure as a method of providing affordable healthcare to people who need it. Instead it has been warped by greedy psychopaths like Brian Thompson into a a system that enriches greedy psychopaths by denying lifesaving care or even just care that would drastically improve quality of life. The $20 billion of "profit" that united health made last year is simply healthcare they denied their customers.
A blind appeal to "rule of law" is the one argument that I think is stupid on its face. Law as the sole moral barometer will always result in marginalization and injustice. It is the function of protest, civil disobedience, and yes, sometimes violence, to shape law as a function of morality.
In other words, of course we need healthcare reform but literally killing healthcare leaders is a path to anarchy, not reform.
Those who beg for war usually get more war than they wanted.
It’s possible that we have a different definition of sympathetic. For me, I mean that his actions feel justified and I would have no problem with him repeating that.
Supposing you accept that definition of sympathetic…Are you generally supportive of more public assassinations? Who is on your list? What about if your list is different from the generally accepted list?
> It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
-- Voltaire
"Rule of law" is great, but when it fails, vigilance is still an option for justice.
on the other hand, the US government seems to have no problem murdering people in other countries who it perceives to be a threat to its geopolitical aspirations, either directly, or indirectly ("acceptable collateral damage")
Not that I find him a sympathetic character. But the concept of "society" is one of the most evil demons to have ever spawned.
Completely agree. If we just lived in little old villages without the support systems for advanced technological systems, people like his mother would have just shrieked in pain while we sprinkled her with various herbs, and he wouldn't even have any idea of shooting someone for the unfairness, because we'd just accept our fates with aplomb.
(/s if not obvious)
Do you actually think doctors / nurses would be able to get all they need through small trades / manufacturing?
I think that knowledge and technology is much less dependent on "society" than we usually think. But of course it all becomes speculation in the end. The Romans in your example had constant assassinations of the most powerful people of their society. But I get what you mean, and of course you're mostly right.
There is no significant leftist movement or momentum in the United States. None. Your choice is between far right (Republican) and center right (Democrat). Both are (neo)liberals. Both are capitalists. Both are united when it comes to US foreign policy. As of the last election, both parties are pro-death penalty (it opposition to the death penalty dropped from the Democratic Party Platform in the 2024 election). Both support the current private health insurance system that most people are angry about.
Notably, Tim Walz (VP candidate) praised UHC in a press comment after the shooting: "a terrible loss for the business and health care community", "Minnesota is sending our prayers to Brian's family and the UnitedHealthcare team". Amy Klobuchar said: "My thoughts are with Brian Thompson's family and loved ones and all those working at United Healthcare in Minnesota". So Democratic Party leaders were very much big supporters of these health insurance companies.
https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/poll-finding/kff-surve...
I don't really see this bias existing to the extent you seem to be implying. The first Trump shooter didn't have many apparent political motives, and the second was completely crazy. The media definitely stops talking about things soon after they happen, but I don't have the impression that they're turning the a blind eye to right wing extremism. I mean, just look up "right wing extremism US" on Google news.
I expect that in this case, the shooter's motivations will defy the standard left/right split as more information is released, much like his apparent influence Ted Kaczynski. You mention Rogan, but Rogan supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. I would say liking Rogan shows an anti-authority streak more than anything.
As for why right wing politically motivated attacks seem to be more common than left wing ones, I'd suggest a few causes.
- People who have access to guns, grew up around guns, are willing to buy guns are more likely to be right wing, and are more likely to be identified as right wing for obvious reasons.
- People with low agreeableness and high neuroticism are more likely to be right wing, and those traits perhaps make politically motivated attacks more likely.
- Extremist right wing thought has perhaps been more effective in recruiting followers than extremist left wing thought since the fall of the Soviet Union.
> But it's worth asking: when someone resorts to violence in this way, why are their politics nearly always right-wing?
while i'm convinced you sincerely believe that, you do realize there are a roughly equal number of people equally sincerely convinced that the media/establishment/"they" are out to get them and their group instead. and that when someone resorts to violence it's (almost) always actually the other group, not them.
replace white with black and right with left. ann rand with marx. fox with msnbc. same "argument", often almost word-for-word.
don't stoop to tribalism as an excuse or explanation.
[Spoiler below if anyone hasn't seen it]
There was guy setup in a room who was pretending to be a pedo so that the protagonist would kill him and his family would get paid by the antagonist.
The protagonist chooses not to kill him which also proves that it wasn't certain anyone else convicted by their psychic tech would have killed.
Anyway, here's a video clip of the fictional cops looking at the suspiciously full room of evidence:
The entire system is an ineffective accountability sink that is highly vulnerable to vertical mergers that capture incredible amounts of money from our society while providing empirically subpar results — results on a dimension that matter quite a lot to people (the health and wellbeing of their loved ones)
Go do some Googling on the antitrust suits against the different combinations of UnitedHealthcare, Optum, and OptumRx.
Doctors (the AMA) killed the public option because it would save money by lowering their salaries. American healthcare is expensive because of providers.
(Another example is that we banned opening new hospitals unless nearby competing hospitals approve of it. This is called "certificate of need".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_America%27s_He...
There are significant generational issues, too. For example, older doctors who owned highly profitable private practices took a very different position from younger doctors who are employees of huge companies, and the pharmaceutical lobby wasn’t opposed to the ACA as long as it didn’t involve cutting their profit margin to what Medicare or the VA pay.
At least blame the right people.
Also FWIW every doctor I know supports universal healthcare, granted most of them are under the age of 40 but you're foolish if you all doctors believe the same thing.
I see you didn't look up the relationship between UnitedHealthcare (the single largest insurer in the country) and Optum (the single largest healthcare provider in the country), did you?
Hint: They're both owned by UnitedHealth Group.
I of course have a nice tech employer plan, but they won't do early refills on medication which means I have to pay cash (well, GoodRX) for that anytime I travel for more than a week. Not a life changing expense but an annoying one. (Maybe my fault for choosing the HSA/HDHP plan?)
Also, I was talking about hospitals and don't believe Optum controls those. Here the plan that runs everything including hospitals would be Kaiser, and as far as I know people are happier with them, but I haven't tried it. Haven't tried ACA marketplace plans either.
Optum doesn't own hospitals specifically because they have strategically chosen to own almost every other type of clinic, including wiping out thousands of independent practices and small groups in just about every medical specialty (including primary care) that you can name.
Kaiser is an example of a much-less-bad version of this same pattern (called a pay-vider). They're non-profit so they don't have nearly the same incentive to leverage one side of their business to benefit the other.
Seriously: go do some research on how UnitedHealthcare, Optum, and OptumRx all coordinate to wipe out competition in local clinics and pharmacies.
> They're non-profit so they don't have nearly the same incentive to leverage one side of their business to benefit the other.
Most US hospitals are nonprofits, but that doesn't make them behave better. You can still earn and pay out a lot of revenue as a nonprofit.
Here's a quick primer: You're a doctor in Podunk, Pennsylvania. UnitedHealthcare is the largest insurer in your region, like it is in most regions. Optum wants to move into your town. UnitedHealthcare will cut your reimbursement rates by 70%, requiring you to see far more patients per day, cut your staff, downgrade your equipment, and generally run a shittier business. Once you're finally on the edge of burnout and fully strangled, Optum will come in with a buyout offer. After the buyout (or after you go bankrupt and they just replace you), suddenly UnitedHealthcare is able to restore rates mostly to where they were previously.
Ta-da!
Note if you take the buyout and then regret it and want to break free: too bad. This deal came with an extremely rigid non-compete clause that they will absolutely actually enforce. FTC tried to get rid of these, in large part for this specific use case, but thankfully the American people (read: megacorps) have the GOP looking out for them so that was struck down.
What exactly does marginal doctor supply fix in this particular scenario? Pretty much nothing. All of them have to accept insurance and the vast majority of their potential customers are insured by the same very few insurers.
Re non-profits: I didn't say it "makes them behave better." I said it subjects them to different incentives. Don't strawman. Kaiser in particular is an exceptionally strong organization in pretty much every way except its financial performance. If you think being non-profit isn't a factor, you're just playing dumb.
Non-profit doesn’t mean what it seems to imply.
Why are you still shifting blame from the politicians who created this system? They didn’t have to listen to the healthcare industry. They are accountable to the public. They got voted into office and they put this system in place. Of course the healthcare CEOs are going to argue in their own interest - but they don’t call the shots here! The politicians do.
The health insurance industry is a modern example of the banality of evil, and there is enough blame to go around.
Night janitor? Probably not enough nexus to be blamed. The Tech Lead on the “Deny Healthcare for Corporate Profits” initiative? Probably as culpable as the CEO.
Satirical example: "Okay, so maybe we knowingly sold guns and mustard-gas to the Elbonian death-squads which they used to kill millions during the genocide, but it's not our fault they were the highest bidder. You can't blame us for a perfectly moral transaction because all parties made a voluntary agreement to exchange goods. In fact, it's people like you who are the real evil ones here, trying to infringe on my right to do whatever I want with my property!"
And "politicians" didn't create that mess either, corrupt politicians who acted on behalf of their donors, rather on behalf of the people they represent, did that. It's not mainly politicians profiting off this after all, some of them kinda just read from the teleprompter. Does that make them blameless? Of course not. Every single person in the chain, be it a chain of command or incentives, is responsible for not refusing to participate.
well that shows why you're not aligned with those out there who are frustrated with Healthcare. We weaken universal healthcare almost the moment the administration shifts. It may as well be unilateral.
/s
#FORCED_CEO_LABOR_HAS_DIRE_CONSEQUENCES
To argue in good faith, I have to assume that you believe what you've written. How should one interpret it? Be explicit.
Cuz sure seems like you're on the side of DDD by default.
Do you think insurance companies are magic money machines that somehow can produce more money to pay for treatment than they collect in premiums?
Do you really think UHC's 6% profit margin is the difference between them being the scum of the earth and perfect angels?
If I were the face of a company using junk AI and other obstruction methods to achieve industry leading denial rates to potentially life saving healthcare, all to build up my company's coffers, I would feel pretty unsurprised.
Maybe he was surprised though. In a possibly apocryphal story, Alfred Nobel was so shocked on reading the way he was described in his (mistaken) obituary that he felt compelled to turn around his legacy.
That's a tremendously generous way of saying, "Many of their customers are dead because the company opted for profit over treatment".
This seems at odds with the numbers I have seen shared here. If not, what do you think would happen if UHC lost money by paying out every claim that they previously denied? Is there an alternative to charging everyone much higher premiums?
Are you saying a government-run insurance company could be run more efficiently, and collect the same amount in premiums yet somehow pay out more in claims?
Do you think it is moral for UHC to deny _any_ claims because they are for treatments which are not medically necessary, or too expensive given the potential benefits? Should UHC pay $1M of policyholders premiums for a risky liver transplant for a chronic alcoholic who is still drinking?
If you accept it is moral for UHC to deny some claims, how do you know that UHC's policies around denying claims (which led to their 6% profit margin) are actually wrong? Because you read some articles with anecdotes about people's bad experience with them?
Beyond that, I have no desire to engage in this conversation with someone who, very clearly, cannot discuss things in good faith right now.
In particular:
1. The folks with incentive to make a bad policy have other ways of personally profiting.
2. IANAAccountant, but I think that isn't including all the money it has sunk into buying competitors and removing choice from consumers and policyholders.
[1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/UNH:NYSE?hl=en&window=M...
Healthcare should not be for-profit, full stop.
>How many people are dead because you didn’t personally volunteer all of your disposable income to pay for their medical care?
A false equivalency that is so disingenuous that it feels intentional.
>Why are you more entitled to your earnings than UHC?
I'd be happy to have my earnings taxed more so that everyone could have equal access to healthcare. That's why I voted for Sanders in 2016.
But hey, keep trying to insinuate that I'm super greedy!
Do you think doctors should work for free? Do you think doctors should work for minimum wage?
Why are doctors entitled to "profit" from their work in healthcare, but a CEO who spends his time organizing the activities of others, isn't? What about an investor who chooses to use his capital to invest in a healthcare company instead of another social media app?
If you're saying that the US should have government-run healthcare, do you realize this is a political decision, in which your opinion is at odds with the current political system in the US, and that killing CEOs in the street over political disagreements is a poor path to go down to resolve political disagreements?
The issue with for-profit healthcare isn't about individual compensation - it's about corporate entities having the power to make sweeping decisions that affect access to healthcare. When large healthcare companies control substantial market share, they can unilaterally raise prices or restrict coverage in ways that leave patients with few alternatives. Unlike choosing a different doctor, patients often can't easily switch insurance providers or hospital systems, especially in emergencies or in areas with limited options.
What's fair compensation for the skilled professional who administers a $50B organization?
Your proposed alternative to corporate healthcare is what? Government-run healthcare? How does that solve the problem of a single entity being able to unilaterally raise prices or restrict coverage, or allow patients flexibility to change their hospital in an emergency?
Are you claiming that government-run healthcare will make better decisions at minimizing cost than private healthcare? What other industry have you found the government to be better at minimizing cost than the private sector?
Medicare has overhead of just 3%.
Last I checked, that's leaps and bounds better than private insurers.
You were saying?
Insurance companies make a profit by taking money and denying claims. Your whataboutism is ridiculous. GP never took anyone's money and then denied their claim.
Those are for tax purposes. You can be sure they extract way more into private pockets through various mechanisms.
Don't you think those margins are calculated from these lower official profits?
Margins have nothing to do with reality. They are a compromise between looking poor for IRS and looking good for investors
Articales show they had lots of unhappy customers.... Also when employes get income of several million a year seems excessive. The CEOS income was around $50,000 a business DAY , probably more that lots people earn in a year. Its reported these customers died/ went bankrupt as a result of insurance company refusals . ( Ive always thought needs to be much stronger government laws around documentation so people aware of what is covered and what is not, could have reduced the number of unhappy customers )
Do you think those patients would have been better off with that $0.20 still in their pocket, and a less qualified CEO running the company?
Yes, if that means that $0.20 went towards patient care.
The money is better spent caring for patients than compensating one man.
- You keep stating that UHC "provides healthcare" (paraphrasing is mine). That is a ridiculous thing to interject into the debate: UHC can be described as paying the bills, but they are not actually providing healthcare in any real sense of that word.
- Because they do not actually _provide_ healthcare, it is very reasonable to ask why they need to spend billions on what essentially amounts to clerical work. We know they spend a lot of overhead on finding ways to _not_ pay for healthcare, which is one way that they could reduce this overhead if they were so inclined.
- It is obscene that in addition to massively overspending on providing this clerical function, they manage to still profit somewhere north of $14 billion dollars. That money, and the overspending on clerical functions, could have and should have been spent on paying for healthcare.
- No single individual should earn a compensation of $10 million dollars; but it is especially wicked to earn that amount of money, essentially, while there are unpaid claims. I won't start ranting about capitalism in general here - the CEO needs a paycheck too - but it's just absurd to think that they alone provide $10 million dollars worth of "value" and it's immoral to provide that compensation _in lieu of paying for healthcare_.
- You keep saying the CEO is "competent." From what I can see, his primary competency seems to have been increasing (or at least, holding steady) the amount of profit that UHC earns year over year. That is to say: he was competent at making sure UHC did not substantially pay for more healthcare. Another way of looking at that is that he was uniquely competent at increasing (or at least, holding steady) the amount of human suffering caused by UHC in exchange for those profits.
So - yes, I stand by my original statement that the population would have been far better off if he were not running the company, because he was carrying out a fundamentally immoral function in society. All of the insurers should be non-profits; in fact, every aspect of our healthcare system should be non-profit. Or at the very least, regulated to only earn a tiny amount of profits. Because there's no way around it - profit in the medical system is always directly tied to extracting more money from a population than it takes to provide that care, and I view that as utterly immoral.
Something along the lines of how technology dehumanizes and displaces us.
That person could then move to a shack in Montana and start mailing bombs to the engineers and tech workers.
Time to reflect how your work is affecting the world, folks. But even if you take action and quit now it's likely they'll find other guns to hire. If you want to make a difference you have to do a lot more than that.
As Joseph Weizenbaum said, that's like saying there are a lot of rapes every day, so it's fine to rape.
Let those other "guns" who get hired (tempted) try and fail to make peace with what they do. If you take their place before they can, you're them, look no further.
We are ALL complicit in the systems behind all this when we are the ones building and maintaining them.
Myself included.
The first step to ethical responsibility is honestly acknowledging what I've been taught to do and have done without unlearning those things. Second step is to consent to unlearning that and learning a different way that addresses all the issues. Third step is actually doing the unlearning/learning.
And even if a major tech CEOs like Zuckerberg or Bezos got shot, while there would be plenty people joking about that, too, it wouldn't be anywhere remotely like this, I'm 100% sure of it. There's something about denying care for profit to people screaming in agony that pushes a whole other set of buttons.
And if you're not doing that, then your point doesn't seem to make sense in the context of the thread.
Trying to highlight different perspectives people can have, and to challenge readers to reflect on the use of violence.
Pick any arbitrary group of people, and you can find another group that thinks they are destroying the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
All that being said, obviously there's no doubt that the healthcare system is pretty messed up.
Many of those jobs even include rich CEOs of billion dollar insurance companies in industries that manage to actually fulfill a (comparatively) reasonable amount of customer claims.
Yes. Happens all the time.
AND ... you seem to be implying that all companies are [ethically, morally, practically] the same.
Without taking a position on the shooting, I will tell you this: all companies are not the same. And this particular company seems to be one of the worst, and that too in an arena that directly impacts people's literal lives.
The issue I see with all this is the anger isn't because this CEO denied claims that should have been accepted (that would be reasonable anger), it's that they denied claims at all. How do people expect insurance to work? An insurance company that never denies claims doesn't stay in business.
(And obviously, yes, I think the US healthcare system is lousy. But in the system you have now, you have insurance companies, and they need to operate in the real world.)
That'll be the people (UNOS) managing the transplant list, which is sorted already sorted by severity and chance of surviving the procedure.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/13/health/liver-transplant-mom-e...
> More than 100 doctors at three of the nation’s top medical centers have weighed in on her case, which is complex and exceedingly rare. Their conclusion: The only way to save Erika’s life is to give her a new liver.
> After weeks of evaluation at the Cleveland Clinic in December and January, Erika finally got her big break.
> On February 2, doctors there approved putting her on the wait list for a liver transplant.
> But Erika hit an immediate wall. Her insurer, UnitedHealthcare, denied coverage for the transplant, saying it would not be a “promising treatment.” She appealed and was rejected again.
1. It's explicitly stated, including by the doctor involved, that this is a "groundbreaking" (read: experimental) procedure, having been performed exactly twice in the US this century.
2. The doctor even says "he can somewhat understand the insurance company’s initial reluctance at coverage".
3. The insurance company denied it because "unproven health services is not a covered benefit" - this is expected, the insurance company can't just take a single doctor's word that "it'll totally work, I'm super good at this surgery".
4. The insurance company ended up approving her claim.
And then, from a different article - https://www.kgw.com/article/news/health/portland-mom-who-sur...
5. UNOS actually downgraded her score on their list (highlighting that, unfortunately, this was not a 'promising treatment').
6. She died during the liver transplant operation.
> Erika had waited more than a year for a liver due to insurance issues.
Yes, if you delay long enough, chances of survival go way down.
(There’s a reason “delay” was one of the three words on the bullet casings, I suspect.)
She was delayed by "insurance issues" by at most 3 months.
She waited more than a year for a liver because she wasn't a good candidate for a liver transplant.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/13/health/liver-transplant-mom-e... has a nice illustrative example of how silly the system UnitedHealthcare and others set up can get.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/nyregion/delay-deny-defen...
> Earlier this year, a Senate committee investigated Medicare Advantage plans denying nursing care to patients who were recovering from falls and strokes. It concluded that three major companies — UnitedHealthcare, Humana and CVS, which owns Aetna — were intentionally denying claims for this expensive care to increase profits. UnitedHealthcare, the report noted, denied requests for such nursing stays three times more often than it did for other services. (Humana had an even higher figure, denying at a rate 16 times higher.)
https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...
> As United reviewed McNaughton’s treatment, he and his family were often in the dark about what was happening or their rights. Meanwhile, United employees misrepresented critical findings and ignored warnings from doctors about the risks of altering McNaughton’s drug plan.
> At one point, court records show, United inaccurately reported to Penn State and the family that McNaughton’s doctor had agreed to lower the doses of his medication. Another time, a doctor paid by United concluded that denying payments for McNaughton’s treatment could put his health at risk, but the company buried his report and did not consider its findings. The insurer did, however, consider a report submitted by a company doctor who rubber-stamped the recommendation of a United nurse to reject paying for the treatment.
They can, in fact, have their billions of profits while not putting their customers in the grave. It's just slightly less profit than they currently get.
Squeezing the blood from the stone here is entirely a choice.
That shows the gross margin of insurance companies (based on premiums vs paid claims). Note that it's negative in some states, and also that's gross margin - so all the insurance companies' costs need to be paid out of that.
They are not making as much profit as you think they are.
How much do you think they should be entitled to make?
If the answer is zero, why would anyone invest in a company that can’t make money?
If the answer is that healthcare should be run by the government, why are you blaming the CEO instead of politicians?
When the options are deny healthcare to someone that has paid you for healthcare and give them the healthcare, it's not morally grey.
Wanting to not be dead or miserable in exchange for a company fulfilling their obligations and maybe having billions in profit instead of billions in profit +1 is far from 'unreasonable'.
This CEO was not some faceless cog with no agency. He was someone with real power and control that willingly made decisions that actively severely and often fatally harmed his customers.
So I do feel morally in the clear to cheer over the death of someone whose bonus hinged on him increasing the suffering and reducing the life span of completely random, innocent people, that, as a group, only had in common „not being rich“.
UHC deliberately denied coverage to millions of people, at least hundreds of whom died as a result. Right now experts are saying that 7 out of 10 juries wouldn't vote to convict Luigi, and based on conversations I've had with people across the political spectrum I'd say the only jury that would convict Luigi is one made up entirely of healthcare executives.
I'm just surprised that this didn't happen sooner.
> The company dismissed about one in every three claims in 2023 — the most of any major insurer. That’s twice the industry average of 16 percent, according to data from ValuePenguin, a consumer research site owned by LendingTree that specializes in insurance. The group’s analysis is based on in-network claims data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
https://www.welcometohellworld.com/this-is-the-most-ghoulish...
The article is biased, as you should also be in the face of evil, but you can follow the links through and eventually get to the materials as presented in court if you're motivated.
This is hideous.
Are cancer patients not miserable? Do oncologists work for free or for minimum wage?
They profit off of providing treatment to human misery. A health insurance company profits off denying treatment. It's not that difficult to understand. But given that every reply from you in this thread has been pathetic and embarrassing defences of healthcare companies and CEOs it's clear you are not operating in good faith.
Is minimizing healthcare spending unethical?
>If your reaction is “Oh, but I’m not the CEO!” you’re deluding yourself (at best).
I don't have much of an IRL online presence, so it'd be a helluva a lot harder to plan a retaliation against me than a public figure.
But yes, I live in downtown L.A. It would not be hard at all for me to piss the wrong person off, or simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Yeah nothing I worked for bankrupted people because they used an out of network surgeon though.
Me refusing to accept a return on some golf shoes without a receipt is not morally equivalent.
I feel safe in that regard.
In particular, I’m thinking (for comparison) of the escape from Clinton Correctional in upstate NY. $23 million spent to recover 2 prisoners and the governor flew in to do a press conference. It wasn’t really rich people that were victims there.
Like it's similar but not quite the same mainly less pronounced cheek bones, wider less "bubbly at the tip" nose.
But honestly maybe I'm just hallucinating this due to differences in angle light conditioning etc.
EDIT: To be clear I'm not saying "it's not him" (implying conspiracy or similar), but saying "my first reaction was huh did I click the wrong link that looks like someone else".
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/person-interest-nyc-assa...
It contains much discussion regarding esp.
- the police finding a gun, multiple IDs and a "manifesto" on his person. Much suspicion of the suspect being a "patsy", i.e., someone falsely incriminated.
- questioning of the rationality of the suspect, i.e., was he mentally ill, a drug user, etc.
Best segment [copied here] concerned the suspect's travels: ...
12 hours ago iamtheghostofeustacemullins:
I don't understand how this guy could be on the lam for five days and only get as far as Altoona PA?
12 hours ago iamtheghostofeustacemullins:
Note to self: It takes me around 8 hours to drive to JFK Airport from Wheeling WV.
12 hours ago ElChapocabra:
He rode an actual lamb?
12 hours ago J Jason Djfmam:
Specifically, an escape goat.
12 hours ago _0000_:
lol
7 hours ago PressCheck:
Worth reading thru all the stupid comments just to read ones like this ...
I'm not sure that's true, given that it's Zero Hedge and therefore like wading through a toxic stew of stupidity and sub-4chan conspiracy theorising.
When I got up this morning I was still laughing about the "escape goat" reference in a long dreary thread raising the possibility of outside actors, planting of evidence, and other wild speculations.
Zerohedge used to be good - maybe it could be good again. It certainly has participation.
Full face pic compared to taxi pic: 81.94% similar
Full face pic compared to hotel pic (not smiling): face matches not found
Full face pic compared to hotel pic (smiling): face matches not found
I am guessing the quality of the hotel pics I found online is too bad for a good test and/or biometrics work better comparing eyes than other face features.
If mods have elected to promote another submission, the comment serves little or no useful purpose.
I'll usually delete my own "dupe" notice comment if I realise that's the case. I commented above to provide clarity to anyone confused by your initial comment.
(I do appreciate that you note dupes with formidable frequency and accuracy. All of us stumble occasionally.)
> 'Missing Implementation for "Deny, Defend, Depose"'
"Could you clarify:
What machine learning model is best suited for the "Deny" phase? (I'm guessing a GAN for plausible deniability?) Is "Defend" using a reinforcement learning approach with adversarial training? For "Depose," are we looking at a classification problem or full-blown unsupervised chaos?
A README section explaining how to integrate this strategy into Halite III bots would be invaluable to the community. Until then, I feel like I'm shooting blanks here."