* 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"
Interesting. It was private for me too. But I clicked to read the full list of the 474 4-star reviews and scrolled and found it. From there I found a direct link to his review which still works (as of a few hours after his name leaked) at:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4065667863
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.
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. "
TBH, this feels like some kind of psychotic break. He just kind of stops posting out of nowhere. On twitter there are some attempts from others to reach him that seem concerned for his wellbeing: https://x.com/DanielleFong/status/1866211089660477490
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.
Some say he had a medical issue and saw first hand the reality of being sick and not an elite in America (even though, by all accounts he probably had good insurance and was quite wealthy in his own right).
26? I was thinking schizophrenia as soon as I heard the age. The weirdness of the situation, unclear motive, and how it seems very out of character all scream onset of some kind of mental illness yes.
So he meticulously planned the rest of the murder, disappeared for almost a year before now, and we are to believe that everything he did in the last year was NOT also staged?
After seemingly acting so carefully right before and after the shooting I’m perplexed as to why he had so much evidence still on him (Gun/silencer, Fake ID, manifesto) during the arrest. One would think he would have discarded or destroyed those things as soon as possible after the incident.
Just to put the hypothesis out there: because he's a fall guy to placate the people afraid of being killed like the UHC CEO, which the authorities desperately need.
(Although a brief perusal of the photos in the article doesn't show anything obviously different between them.)
This seems extremely unlikely in practice considering how many people would need to play along. Also what happens if more evidence appears afterwards or the actual killer gives himself up? You just end up playing whack a mole to keep the lie working. No it really doesn't make sense.
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.
You would probably want the fall guy to be someone who can't defend themselves easily, like someone with substance abuse issues and prior convictions, not an attractive 26 year old valedictorian with an affluent family.
With is face pretty much being captured on camera in the hostel and in an Uber I'm not sure there was much point hiding it. He was going to get caught shortly whatever he did.
Not sure I agree with that. Had he stayed in hiding for months, he wouldn’t have been ID’d. Why is he walking around bare-faced a few days later? My take is he planned the actual act but didn’t think about much beyond that.
If he ditched the gun, fake IDs and any other evidence he had tying him to the crime and just gave the cops his real id and denied being in NYC recently, it would have made it much harder to prosecute. Without any physical evidence, he just looked like the shooter.
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.
[...]
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
Eric Adams doesn't have a strong reality filter, and it's usually good to cross-check things he says, especially if he's the only person saying them. I don't think he consciously makes things up, he just tends to gravitate towards saying things that sound good in the moment.
Or, if we're being really charitable, they were chasing the wrong guy.
I like understanding why people are making things up.
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.
He lies constantly. Like, he lives in New Jersey and pretends to live in NYC. He pretends to be a vegan.
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."
I don't know why you are being downvoted. My father was a cop, went through the academy when I was 15. I distinctly remember him explaining to me about how they are taught to lie to get people to cross their stories up.
Lolol. Were thinking of the ones who break into your house and kill you thinking it was their’s, the ones that killed Breonna Taylor, chased a black man running etc.
Jesus Christ thank you. I understand the political climate means the word "lie" is somehow a bad word but thank you for saying it. It's still a fucking lie. It might even be worse, because the bullshitters like that are often so oblivious that it makes it harder to tell they're lying. And yet, it has the same damn effects in every measurable way.
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.
> 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.
It hinges on what the word “that” in “release that” is referring to. If it’s referring to releasing his name, then he’s implying not releasing his name is a choice which implies they have the option to release it, so they must know it. If it’s referring to releasing whether or not they know his name, then it’s not implying anything. If this was said by someone with a history of well-spoken and thoughtful public statements, then it’d most likely be the latter interpretation. Given it’s Eric Adams, either is plausible. In fact, the bullshit-ness of the former may make it even more probable here.
Police lie all the time, but this is police _implying_ a lie. To me it (clearly?) read as if they were keeping their cards close to their chest, not saying either way.
That's a common tactic to try and get a suspect to turn themselves in.
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.)
Sure, for nonviolent criminal offenses. It helps that accepting responsibility for one's actions (as demonstrated by turning oneself in) generally results in significantly reduced sentencing.
For violent offenses, and especially for high-profile murder cases, they don't give the suspect the option of turning themselves in.
> 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.
RE "....when they said they knew who he was yesterday it was a lie....."
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 !!!
It's hard to believe that this is true. There seems to be enough people who knew him, from friends and family who were worried about him, to people who went to school or worked with him. Do you want to tell me that not even a single person identified him in the pictures and notified the police? Not to mention that his friends and family didn't know where he is, so it fit the narrative perfectly.
They weren't lying, but it was the wrong thing to say. They had a list of suspects and they may have had high confidence that one of them was their guy. But they couldn't know that at least until they took someone into custody.
> Police revealed that finding the 26-year-old was a complete surprise, and that they did not have his name on a list of suspects prior to today.
"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.
I wonder if the McDonald's employee really recognized him from those couple of off-angle photos or if Mr. Mangione himself initiated the action in order to let someone "deserving" collect the reward. It seems to me that he wanted to be caught, and the amount of evidence that he was carrying on him is obviously meant to establish his identity beyond any doubt. The amount of meticulous planning he undertook for the actual shooting contrasts with the trail of evidence that he kept dropping along the way. He would've basically never been found if he had just worn a pair of sunglasses.
>in order to let someone "deserving" collect the reward.
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.
> in order to let someone "deserving" collect the reward.
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.
Compared to the amount of reactions I see in the posts, I suspects users are deterred to comment because a big part of GitHub is "work related" and it could be seen as an endorsement to a murderer
It's too bad: they really should give prisoners like this computers with some limited access so they can work on coding projects. What else are they going to do with their time, after all? Perhaps they could spend it contributing to open-source projects and helping society.
Part of prison is that you can't communicate to the external world without being monitored. Any shared code would also have to be reviewed. Even in Norway internet use is banned, except for educational purposes, which presumably limits you to wikipedia and .gov
That's understandable, but perhaps they could just give him an isolated PC, and let him pick some github projects he wants to clone, download those (after approval of course) and put them on the PC, let him work away on it for a while, perhaps allow periodic pulls from those repos, and then when he has something to contribute, give those to someone to review for anything disallowed (like a manifesto in the comments or whatever), and once they confirm it's just working source code, allow it to be contributed somehow to the project so they can accept it or not, understanding where it's coming from.
It would be a good project but you need people to review all code. I think effort/money could be spent on more pressing matters in this environment; open-source contribution is rather niche.
I'm sure they can find outsiders happy to review code contributions. Any decently-run OSS project would already do this, after all, so it wouldn't be hard to just contact them and find a person already active in that organization willing to do the review and communicate back to the prison, assuming it's a project that really would like some extra full-time help for the next ~50-75 years (not all might, but some definitely would).
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).
Jailhouse lawyering involves the aspects of law that most correspond to code - reading documentation to learn a system and converting a human language request into a very strictly formatted request. If they can't do that then they should spend their time in jail learning what they're missing.
There is a wide variety of jobs between "try to maximize denials and ensure maximal suffering and customer death as often as possible" American medical insurance company CEO, and useless trash job worker.
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.
Well, tech workers aren't directly to blame but they're surely enabling bigger men to do their dirty deeds.
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.
> even if you take action and quit now it's likely they'll find other guns to hire
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.
And that person could be found to be making accurate assessments. What of it?
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.
It's true that AI will be a tool used to harm people in a broad set of use cases, but the tools are too far removed from their respective applications in people's minds. People directly deal with health insurance companies, not the software vendors that sell the tools with sanitized descriptions.
It feels dishonest to imply that software engineers and tech workers, broadly, are comparable to major USA healthcare CEOs in their perceived devilhood status on average. Major social media and tech giant CEOs, sure, but even then I think they might still be a little lower on the list.
And if you're not doing that, then your point doesn't seem to make sense in the context of the thread.
People can't just say or do any old random thing and get as much support as this gets. It does have to strike an actual nerve.
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.
I’m not cheering this guy on but you’re not paying attention if you think people’s complaints about health insurance in general and UHG in particular amount to “unhappy customers.”
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.
The people that should be blamed are the politicians that created this mess in the first place, not the people administering the broken system that they can’t change unilaterally.
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.
The people administering these broken systems who are being paid huge salaries are totally innocent, they had no other alternative, they wanted regular salaries and to do good to their customers but were forced into these jobs.
People do blame the politicians, but they rightly also blame anyone who has a hand in and nexus to furthering the rotten system. CEOs, AI algorithms people who write algorithms to deny coverage, software developers who ship it to production, etc are all culpable to some degree. The bigger the nexus, the more the culpability.
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.
Execs of companies beyond a certain size are part of the political elite - in fact they probably have more political strength then the average politician.
No, it's not that black-and-white. The politicians are to blame, as are the corporations and business interests who continue to take advantage of the system for financial gain, as opposed to working to fix it from within.
The system was created at their behest specifically not to reduce their profitability. If you didn’t follow the debate 15 years ago, the ACA was the compromise adopted after the healthcare industry plowed money into advertisements, lobbying, and astroturf to kill the idea of a public option. The concept traces back to the Heritage Foundation’s proposal offered after the healthcare industry killed the Clinton healthcare plan in 1993, but the Republicans immediately switched to opposing that as soon as it had any chance of passing because literal billions were on the line as soon as insurers couldn’t drop the most expensive customers from their pools.
What role did the CEO who was killed play in that debate 15 years ago?
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.
A better question would be why you’re trying so hard to exonerate some of the richest and most powerful people in the country. Trying to blame nebulous politicians without thinking about how they got elected or what they were asked to do legislatively, or how much public opinion is shaped by mass communications and the status quo, feels like a joke about a physicist trying to say another field shouldn’t exist because their “assume a perfectly spherical cow” thought exercise wasn’t too complicated.
The guy who was killed, with annual compensation of $10M, is one of the richest and most powerful people in the country? There are FAANG ICs making more than that.
There may be a few IC's who make that amount but they do not wield nearly the same amount of power as the CEO of one of the largest healthcare companies in the country.
Do those FAANG ICs set policy for the largest healthcare company in the world? I don’t know why you’re so committed to trying to dismiss the idea that the policies his company sets have produced many angry customers but it’s not unreasonable for people to think that a CEO has some control over policy in a way that those ICs at adtech companies do not.
I'm not the GP and in fact I don't agree with the GP, but I really don't think anyone should have to explain why they are defending someone who they think is innocent, regardless of how much money that person does or does not have.
This isn’t a criminal case. They’re trying to say this is just like any other unhappy customer, ignoring the life-altering outcomes healthcare problems have unlike most other industries or how much more Americans pay for lower-quality, high-stress service. Trying to understand why so many people were conflicted about a murder without understanding that context is like trying to explain what’s going on in Gaza while refusing to consider the role religion played.
If you are willing to shift the blame from the CEOs, why stop by shifting it one level? Why not shift it all the way to the top, to the voters who voted in the politicians?
The health insurance industry is a modern example of the banality of evil, and there is enough blame to go around.
Hey, why not blame the shareholders. If you own a mutual fund that may be you! ... or me. The irony of people funcking themselves over via this route is kinda funny.
The ACA caps health insurers' profits. When you say "the healthcare industry", you're confusing insurers and providers, who are not allied.
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".)
It’s wrong to state this as a binary. This isn’t mutually exclusive and all of the parties profiting from the status quo had a common interest in preventing reforms - those don’t overlap perfectly so the groups fissured on different lines but they lobbied independently and as part of joint groups like this one:
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.
> The ACA caps health insurers' profits. When you say "the healthcare industry", you're confusing insurers and providers, who are not allied.
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?
I'm aware, they run the prescription side of my employer health plan. But if they denied care for me, that would actually be my employer doing it. Most employers self-insure and set how much they want to pay. The insurance company is more like a fall guy for them.
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.
Nope, you're not aware. The part running your prescription side is yet another part of the UHG business. That one is OptumRx.
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.
I'll look into it if I get the time. Though, would be pretty easy to defeat monopolies in local clinics if we simply had a lot more local clinics, eg by increasing the supply of doctors to what other countries have.
> 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.
I'm all for increasing supply of doctors but uhh yeah, you really don't understand the dynamics at play here if you think "would be pretty easy to defeat monopolies in local clinics."
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.
This is a factually incorrect statement, Joe Lieberman killed the public option not "doctors."
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.
The execs of these companies aren't just hapless administrators plodding along in a broken system of someone else's design. They very clearly to everything they can to extract as much value as they can from the situation.
The idea that a business is morally blameless to act in any way as long as it A. improves profit, and B. is within the law; and that everybody must limit themselves to voting with their patronage and are somehow wrong to e.g. voice criticism; is obviously, intuitively false.
Closely related: The idea that a market-priced transaction is fundamentally neutral and creates a moral and ethical firewall between both halves.
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!"
If "just following orders" wasn't already completely null and void, i.e. if it was possibly to come up with an even worse defense, "just following incentives" would be that defense.
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.
RE ... that some of those customers are unhappy....
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 )
I don’t see it that way. It cost patients $0.20 each to have a competent person running the company. Without a competent person running the company, UHC would go bankrupt and would not be able to provide any healthcare at all. I am not sure that $0.20 is too high a price to have a competent person in charge.
- 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.
>How would you feel if one of those unhappy customers showed up at your home and shot you dead?
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
There are right answers though. Certainly far more "right" than what they currently do.
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.
I think reducing healthcare costs in the US is an important problem with no right answers, and this sometimes involves denying care that people think they need.
That’s not the problem being solved. If it were, the answer would be to pay out the same amount taken in. As evidenced by the fact that the company in question has investor meetings, the problem being solved is to pay out as little relative the amount taken in.
We don't have enough livers for every transplant case; someone needs to say no to some of them. If you think that's necessarily an evil act, you need to think harder.
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.)
> 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.
Yah, that's a mistake (or lie) by the article; from your CNN article, she was initially put on the transplant list on Feb 2, and ended up approved by mid-May (it's after May 2, but before Mother's Day, on May 13).
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.
The countless needlessly dead "customers" aren't really happy or unhappy anymore. They're dead.
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.
> Have you ever decided that some of those unhappy customers were unreasonable, or even totally wrong, given all the facts?
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.
> Does an oncologist "directly profit off of human misery"?
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.
If I was the CEO of a company and I made repeated conscious choices to deliberately deny people a life-saving service they paid for so I could get a slightly higher obscenely large bonus, I'd expect people to try and extract revenge.
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.
I am skeptical that unh is denying more than other insurers. Since half their business is physician practices, they actually make more money treating the patients. Also they have more physicians on staff making decisions than competition, and I would rather doctors are more involved in those decisions than mba’s. in fact they are probably too effective, and the competition is running scared looking for antitrust protection.
> 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.
Check out the discovery on this barely-related lawsuit that revealed that they had specifically adopted a policy of denying covered treatment to addicts because they determined that that group was particularly unlikely to follow through with an appeal.
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.
What do you think is a reasonable way to do business in an industry where every patient feels very strongly that they should get the best and most expensive treatment available regardless of their ability to pay?
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?
The 6% is just the shareholders' cut, right? How much of the remaining "operational expenses" actually add meaningful value to the patients' healthcare?
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?
There's a big difference between compensating skilled professionals for their work and running healthcare as a profit-maximizing business. Doctors deserve fair compensation for their expertise and time, just like any other skilled professional.
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.
> Doctors deserve fair compensation for their expertise and time, just like any other skilled professional.
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?
>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.
I think both of you are headed down a false path because that "profit" metric isn't meaningful here. A company can be rapacious and growing and exploitative without that always being reflected in "revenue minus expenses."
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.
> How many people are dead because you didn’t personally volunteer all of your disposable income to pay for their medical care?
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.
UHH profit margins are far greater than 6%. Companies with 6% margins do not grow market cap and shareholder value by 8000 % since Jan 2000. i.e the stock rise has risen 80 times from their ~$7 Jan 2000 price to around $560 today.[1]
Is it your belief that UHC could have approved every denied claim and paid for these out of their 6% profit margin?
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?
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, my belief is that healthcare should not be for-profit, full stop. Everyone should be able to get the care they need, full stop. Whatever that looks like, just not whatever the current bullshit is.
Beyond that, I have no desire to engage in this conversation with someone who, very clearly, cannot discuss things in good faith right now.
The company that did the worst thing I ever worked for did… drum roll… cold calls to random people trying to sell them beds, mattresses, pillows and blankets.
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“.
RE "...ever learned that some of those customers are unhappy...." There are even books about health care insurance industry practice of denying customers claims. Even research papers .... So is not just "...some unhappy customers ..." that is definite
The funniest thing about the whole thing to me is that we have had privacy taken away or even voluntarily given it up to the police state in the name of security and then this guy randomly walks up and offs a member of the 1% and the only reason he got caught was because the feds got lucky.
Even then he might have escaped further notice if he'd ditched all the incriminating stuff. It's one thing to kind'a look like a guy in a low-quality pic; it's quite another to have the cops checking you out find all your murder gear with you.
Yeah, that part really surprised me too. He had advanced degrees and top grades, so he was clearly a smart guy, so why did he make such a dumb mistake that anyone who's watched a few murder mysteries would know not to do? Like some others have said, it seems like he probably wanted to get caught.
It sounds like he had a mental break. Not saying he didn't have good reasons for doing what he did, but the twitter detectives posted that his family and friends have been looking for him for the past 6 months.
You can be smart and still slip up, especially under pressure (and as we're learning, possibly mental and physical pain). Presumably one of the reasons why professionals are better is that, beyond working experience, they have a lot of practice.
(In Dr. Strangelove voice) "Of course, the whole point of a ghost gun is lost if you keep it!"
Seriously tho, the fact that he went to the trouble of obtaining one shows that he gave that some thought. But then didn't follow through. So yeah, maybe he did want to get caught.
> Even if the cops didn't find anything on him they'd ID him for real
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.
I'd ask if Luigi's assets exceeds the $15 million of insider trading the CEO was accused of, but whether they're richer than the other doesn't (shouldn't) matter.
My assumption is that if you're in a rich family you have access to more than your personal assets, but it probably depends on how much your parents like you.
I think describing the dead guy as a "member of the 1%" is a lot less relevant if this isn't a class-war type of assassination.
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.
I think this one is more ideological than traditional class. Either you agree with the way American healthcare companies operate, or you don’t. The dysfunctions of the industry have the potential to directly impact anyone of any class.
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.
It's actually not that hard to find them, they just don't take insurance. The prices are not that high if you are not going to be back on a recurring basis.
You're still in the blast radius if your loved ones or friends suffer unnecessarily due to the healthcare industry. It's so pervasive that it's not to hard to imagine a scenario where this guy was disgruntled by simply observing the brazen profiteering taking place at the expense of human life. Many have shrugged it off as status quo capitalist behavior, but if you choose to go down the rabbit hole you'd find it very easy to locate people who have been on the losing side of the healthcare industry
This is just really funny because the implication is then something like "he wasn't a victim or a working class hero, he was a rich guy, and they're actually the bad guys.. because look! They're murderers!" And then presumably the other side can just be like, "Ok well sure, that's our point anyway I guess..."
Well, it's not really luck. It's exactly because there's cctv in enough places that they were able to get his photo from the one moment he lowered his mask at the hostel, but even more significantly that they were able to piece together his movements enough to be able to suspect that the guy at the hostel was the same one that carried out the shooting. Then it was a matter of distributing the photo and hope someone recognizes him. And offering the reward ofc. Very simple but not luck.
It still came to down to a crappy photo from a security cam and not the drones, internet surveillance, or facial recognition software in constant use against us.
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.
Not only were security cameras not as prevalent as they are now, they had terrible video quality. We'd have an extremely grainy grey photo of a face. Not enough to visually recognise him later.
The surveillance state is good at deterring people who don't want to get caught. If you're ready to lay down your life or freedom for an assassination, it's really pretty hard to stop such a person with the patience to prepare for it - multiple cops have told me this.
Maybe not the _only_ reason he got caught, but a major reason is exactly what OP mentioned: the victim was a member of the 1%.
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.
With programmers, hackers, computer scientists, systems designers/engineers carrying some of the most privileged skillsets needed for designing and implementing replacements to systems of oppression (and disruptions to said systems), I've been wondering where the ones working to do this can be found.
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?
If you want better healthcare you don't need to invent anything new or "disrupt systems of oppression". Just pick another country where it's working and do what they do.
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.
> If you want better healthcare you don't need to invent anything new or "disrupt systems of oppression". Just pick another country where it's working and do what they do.
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?
The AMA artificially caps the number of doctors and hospitals we have to increase salaries and costs. So no it doesn't necessarily take more resources to do these things
They've backed off on that and I think support more residency slots for training doctors now, but it actually is a funding issue because Medicare pays for a lot of that.
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 AMA has reversed position from their 1990s lobby to limit residency slots (which got enacted under the Republican "Contract with America"). At this point, increasing funding for residency slots would be seen as increasing government spending and is politically unpalatable.
medical school admissions is such a zero sum pissing contest of schmoozing profs for research positions, building houses for free in africa, grinding academics far past the point where the knowledge is beneficial, sheer perseverence, and sometimes being the right skin colour. the US could 10x the number of residency spots (and therefore med school spots) without significantly diminishing the capability of the incoming class to be good doctors.
>If you want better healthcare you don't need to invent anything new or "disrupt systems of oppression". Just pick another country where it's working and do what they do.
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.
I've seen enough of American politics to consider that copying a better system and lying your ass off that it's American made would work (tbh this would work for most modern democracies).
The United States is #2 in the OECD for MRI machines per capita [1], with double that of France and nearly four times as many as Canada. Of the 38 nations of the OECD, only Japan has more MRI machines per person.
There is additional nuance here. Not all of the MRI machines are the same.
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.
You’re on the right path my friend, hang on to the feeling that drove you to write this. Not everyone has it, and you may even find yourself having woken up with it missing one day. So use it while you have it
Thanks for the encouragement! I care for a 6-year old I've nurtured through anarchic principles. This feeling, if it can go missing, is reignited by things they say and normalized forms of childhood oppression they experience/witness.
> I'm looking for different paths than murder to accomplish this.
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.
>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.
Exactly: look at the people behind the Ford Pinto (with the exploding gas tank), and more recently the people behind the Boeing 737MAX.
I hate to defend them, but at least with Philip Morris, they warn you outright that their products cause cancer, right on the package, yet people keep buying them anyway. (Yes, I know they had to be forced into this years ago by the government, but still that's better than Boeing where the government said their product was safe.)
Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds didn't put such labels on the foods they developed after buying major food companies in the 80s and applying their addiction tech to our diets.
I haven't fully fact checked this, but I have read that some of the same scientists the tobacco industry hired to fake research and lie to the public about the harms of smoking have been working as GRAS panelists tasked with convincing the FDA that food additives are totally safe. Seems like nothing could go wrong there.
It is reasonable that corporations and individuals "protect themselves". No one wants to work for a company that's been damaged by bad judgement or bad luck. So companies have boards of directors and stockholders to oversee operations, hold officers liable to varying degrees, and purchase insurance against risks.
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.
He was carrying all of the evidence with him, including the fake ID he used at the hostel, the gun & suppressor, mask, and even a handwritten manifesto that points to his motivation. It seems he wanted to be found.
Exactly my thoughts as well. Every piece of evidence law enforcement has was basically intentionally provided by him. If he just stuffed his trash in one of his 7 pockets, or wore a pair of sunglasses, or didn't actually stare straight at the camera in the taxi like he was getting his school picture taken? I mean pretty much the only thing he failed to do was leave his business card at the crime scene.
Version 2.0 of this crime will feature the shooter having the forethought to have put a bitcoin wallet address on the front of his mask as he traipsed around in front of the cameras.
In the movie "Wag the Dog", Dustin Hoffman plays a Hollywood producer who is hired by the President to create a fake war to take attention away from another scandal. Spoiler alert Near the end, Hoffman's character is upset that the President's re-election is credited to something else instead of his handiwork. Even when told he's risking his life if he says anything, he yells "I want the credit!". I think a similar psychology may be at work in this and other crimes that become (in)famous.
I _think_ what you're getting at is saying the suspect wants the credit, in response to the parent saying the next one will be better at evasion by learning from his mistakes, right? And implying the next one might not want to evade either? I have no speculation here just looking for clarification on the movie reference.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. Obviously anybody who goes to the trouble of penning a manifesto is a hero/protagonist in their own narrative. When they see that their acts have captured the attention or even admiration of a significant portion of the public, the urge to stand up and say "I'm the one who did this great deed, and here's why" will often overpower the instinct for self preservation.
Or maybe he’s just not that smart… it’s pretty much expected some number will lose their marbles and become semi-deranged or fully deranged every year.
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.
It's sometimes asked about whether you'd follow the evidence - people aren't excluded (at least by the judge) for just knowing what the concept is.
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.
> 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.
of course the case would be retried, but if after the first mistrial there is a widespread partying in the streets, and then the second mistrial the same, and then the third trial starts there is rioting, the way the system currently works they might decide not to try a fourth trial. Of course I don't know if the U.S is there yet.
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.
In the one case I sat on the jury for the judge told us that we had to follow their directions exactly as to how to interpret the law when making a sentence. We were informed we not allowed to choose a lighter charge (options were misdemeanor assault, assault and aggravated assault).
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.
The jury ended up giving them assault, not aggrivated. Aggrivated required pre-mediatation. But the guy was drunk and did something dumb and quick. It wasn't pre-meditated. The judge was essentially telling us it had to be aggrivated, but also quoted the law. The jury voted for non-aggrivated. But it was 3 strikes so he got the same sentence (the full boat) no matter if he was aggrivated or non-aggrivated.
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.
I don't unfortunately, that would be buried somewhere in federal codes.
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.
A juror can't be punished for their decision, ever. It doesn't matter whether a juror keeps their reasoning a secret or not.
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.
Perhaps the jurisdiction where you practice is different than the ones I do? In federal court, and the states I'm familiar with, the judge certainly can punish you for disobeying instructions. You take an oath, and the judge orders you, to follow the instructions.
In the situation of jury nullification, though, the judge would have to be punishing a juror for the verdict they supported. That isn't legal at least in the US, a juror can't be instructed to give a certain verdict or punished based on their decision.
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.
> Most people don't even know what jury nullification is, and even fewer realize it is in fact legal. I'd be surprised if he was banking on that.
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.
Courts can be against it all they want, it is still legal and well within a juror's rights. I'd never expect a judge or attorney to raise it as an option, but at the end of the day it is.
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.
The judge, prosecution and defense get to vet each juror by asking them about their beliefs and biases. They can reject jurors if they believe the juror is unable to hear a case without being impartial. Jurors (often) won't be told the details of the case they'll be hearing while they're being vetted, only the basic details (e.g. defendant is a white male accused of murdering another white male).
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.
Judges generally hate it but there's also nothing they can do about it if it happens.
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.
How so? All he had to do was continue to fly under the radar for a few more weeks until everyone forgot about it. Being on the lam implies they knew his identity; they did not.
If I nonjudgmentally assumed you speak from personal experience, doesn't it also depend on the person, their sensitivity, vulnerabilities etc.?
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")
> he just behaved the worst he's ever behaved in daycare today
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.
We already do that, but maybe even more is necessary. The problem is that I'm 52 and already had sleep apnea/CPAP, she is 49, and my son is 3. Every day is an exhausting marathon.
I understand, and I know that for each person the circumstances are different. I hope you are both able to find the strength to just - be with him. I wish you all the best!
Please consider reading this book. It changed my life:
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
I'm saying this as a father who was going through the worst time of my life as my baby daughter's top 3 records for "most sleep in one night" was 5 hours (which only happened that one time), 3 hours (which only happened that one other time), and then never ever more than 2 sleep cycles of 45 minutes on any day/night.
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.
I've found that trying to describe the strategies in a few words usually gets the other person to think "oh, it can't be that simple" and then not actually try it.
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!
I feel like a lot of doctors and nurses wouldn’t be doctors or nurses without the decent profit they earn.
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.
That's... not what I meant. It is one thing to earn (very) good wages and entirely another thing to optimise the whole healthcare for profit. Healthcare is, by definition, a cost center. If you wanted to align incentives (a bit better) you would be paying for it only when you are not ill, not when you are. 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. However the incentives are never completely aligned - someone profits from people being ill.
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.
It was indirect, and people always see themselves as the good guy. It's easy to justify in your mind. "I'm saving shareholders money." "Most doctors over service patients, so they are the bad guys." "They would have died anyway," etc.
I would bet a lot of the healthcare CEO's are totally surprised that anyone would want to harm them.
Another way to think of it would be, how much would it cost for a very rich family or person to hire few people to hunt you for the following 10 years.
He stalked his prey and killed it. That's hunting. Then law enforcement tracked him and trapped him. Also hunting! But none of the rich family has done any hunting (yet). So far they are the hunted.
I'm not. Hunting people in a safe democratic society isn't "romantic", it's not "The Most Dangerous Game" or anything else. Your analogy is absolutely accurate. Harvesting an oyster would be another. Still totally hunting (or maybe just gathering).
> the rest of their lives
Only if any of their adversaries survive with sufficient will to fight.
I think based on examples I am seeing for what qualifies as a bon mot, it would be different, but since you specified "attempt" in parentheses I guess it could qualify as some sort of attempt.
The thing is I don't think it is a genuine attempt. Is more like an intentionally counterfeit bon mot. It doesn't actually engage with the parent sentiment, but might fool people that are only half reading.
> All he had to do was continue to fly under the radar for a few more weeks until everyone forgot about it.
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.
They know what his face looks like and had a bunch of information about his whereabouts prior to visiting the city. It was only a matter of time until they found him. His one bet might have been to cross the border in Mexico.
I think this might actually be it - he may have been motivated in some part by fame (but planned to be anonymous and get away with it) and after the hugely positive online response decided to purposely get caught.
I'm real interested in how a trial goes. Can you even find enough people in America who haven't been bent over by insurance to form an unbiased jury? I find it hard to imagine any jury would convict him.
I keep seeing this take, and it seems pretty bizarre to me. Most Americans rate their health insurance as excellent or good [1], and even of the ones that don't, most probably don't support murdering health insurance executives on the street.
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.
I think the problem is with outliers. Most people don’t have problems with thier health insurance because they don’t interact with it much or just have routine care.
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)
I generally agree but think it’ll depend on how sympathetic his case is and what defense he tries. I believe New York juries have to reach a unanimous decision and if he had one of those insurance horror stories it wouldn’t be unheard of for at least one juror to feel sympathetic to, say, a provocation defense and only find him guilty of lesser charges.
Yes, as I said the mostly likely outcome is guilty but it wouldn’t shock me if, say, he wasn’t convicted on every charge. Juries introduce a human element and the response to this murder illustrates how many people really hate insurance companies. Something over 10% of Americans say they know someone who died due to denied care, which is a big enough number that I wouldn’t rule anything out.
There are other stats in play, too. For example, 30% of Americans know a murder victim. 50% have dealt with gun violence. The jury system narrows down to people who can focus on the law and follow the judge’s instructions. The pool of potential jurors is huge. It’s been rare that a trial has changed counties in any state because too many people in a county have strong feelings about the victim or perpetrator. I could see lesser murder charged being brought to keep motivation out of the trial, though. And yes, rule nothing out (in any trial.)
I'm not sure that is even necessary. I know enough people impacted by such things I'm not sure I wouldn't nullify even though I haven't been impacted myself. I don't think they can find 12 people who don't know someone with a bad story.
Isn't that a reverse conflict of interest? That way you are deliberately selecting people that are more/less sympathetic than a baseline of the US population.
It's not as if "he was mistreated by an insurer" is a defence, is it? That should be entirely irrelevant to the jury's finding, although sentencing might take it into account. The jury just needs to decide if he did it, so not having been mistreated by an insurer shouldn't preclude someone from making that decision.
'Shouldn't' is true. But the prosecution does not need to explain why they reject a potential juror by 'preemptive challenge'. Why would they take the chance?
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.
Agreed yet he'll serve some time like Gypsy Rose. A seemingly good hearted victimized murderer who story seems to work out well for her in the end in. She orchestrated killing her mom vs. just running away. If she's smart enough to get her mom killed indirectly using a lonely dude she's smart enough to run away. Murderer who is free with fame. Luigi is now the same yet is this murderer more liked then Gypsy Rose?
It doesn’t matter what the brass say when giving orders. If the officer says the magic words during debriefing (after the shooting), he gets off scott free.
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.
Yeah, the timing is a question I still have. At first it sounded like he was only there a few minutes before the CEO appeared. Later information sounds like he might have been hanging around outside for longer. I haven't seen a knowledgable evaluation of how plausible it is that he would have known where Thompson was going to be based only on public information.
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.
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.
It’s all very convenient and airtight, very nicely packaged.
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.
Agreed. He seems to be smart enough to never be caught. Could just be the need to be liked/famous/known. On the other hand, he might not have expected to be noticed by someone who knew him. That's a real 0.01% you can't predict in your perfect planning.
He doesn't seem smart at all... He took off his mask in front of a camera to flirt with a receptionist. He left a long extensive trail of evidence. He manifesto sounds like it was written by a 14 year old. It only took him four days to get caught. Like most criminals, he is not smart.
Less than 50% of murders are solved these days[1]. If he hadn't been carrying around all of the evidence and was more careful with the mask he very well may have gotten away with it, the NYPD had no clue who or where he was
No, but most murders aren't done by complete strangers who live far from the crime scene either. When they are, and they are careful, they are extremely hard to catch
Is having bugs in your code proof that you're not smart, or is it more likely momentary carelessness or even just that humans always have a non-zero error rate?
And he really could have gotten away with it if he wanted to. Im sure he noticed online the vast population of people willing to hide him or provide an alibi.
I doubt he was arrogant. I think he was on the run and didn’t have any place to put away the evidence. Probably homeless this whole time. And had to go to get food at some point.
It's been several days, he had plenty of time to wipe stuff down and dump it. I don't think this is arrogance necessarily, perhaps isolation and paranoia.
Probably hadn't really thought through the specifics of tossing evidence.
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.
> I doubt he was arrogant. I think he was on the run and didn’t have any place to put away the evidence. Probably homeless this whole time. And had to go to get food at some point.
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).
I am reading 'The Man Who Fell To Earth" and it's about this supposedly very smart martian who makes very basic mistakes that led to his capture. There is a quote, something to the effect, 'it's amazing the number of things you just don't think about'. Which I think is true and why people got caught. Truth is, he had a lot on his mind and that can make you very clumsy.
Do they record names of guests? It would take two seconds to ask the NJ DMV if someone by that name exists. If they don't, then the ID was probably fake. If there is someone by that name, showing the real ID photos to the hostel receptionist would quickly clear up whether the ID is fake or not. The receptionist flirted with him and got him to show his face so there's a good chance she'd be able to look at some photos and say whether any of them look like the guy.
>Last time I was there they wouldn't even record NJ.
>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.
“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.
If this is a vendetta, the goal was achieved and there was nothing more to do. He had to give himself two goals, the vendetta and not get caught, which is more difficult than one goal. A hired killer would pursue both goals routinely as a mean to stay in business but not an amateur and anyway not as effectively.
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.)
Surely you recognize that all you need to do is to rub it on some concrete for a couple of minutes to completely destroy it right? Not to mention if you owned a pair of scissors or a lighter or something…
> you recognize that all you need to do is to rub it on some concrete for a couple of minutes to completely destroy it right
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.
> Police don’t go around fingerprinting random pieces of plastic
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.
I would think that getting rid of the evidence is the integral part of planning a crime. Otherwise it is sloppiness. There is a lot of ways to do such things I am sure, but you have to thought it through before. He didn't or the adrenaline was too much for him.
A lot of people who commit crimes are suffering from a range of untreated mental illnesses. They are not always firing on all cylinders all of the time, leading to weirdness like this.
Most folks with mental illnesses live among us, not in mental institutions. If on a scale 1-10 you have something like bipolar on 1 or 2, you can sort of function with some meds. Sort of, until SHTF and emotions go haywire. Keeping relationships is hard, be it personal or professional, so folks struggle but from outside they often just appear 'weird'.
Wife is a GP doctor, maybe 1/3rd of her patients have some form of this.
100% this. I've seen stats saying 20% of people in jail have untreated mental illness. I've spent a lot of time in jails and I would say it has be 80%+ because a lot of people can function enough to live in society and hide their symptoms until the point where they do something criminal.
This sounds ridiculous, given his family background, from which running out of money seems unlikely, but it’s actually plausible. I know a lot of people who came from wealth but who insisted on fighting their own battles. I personally wouldn’t recommend it, though.
Also (I'm hoping) the trauma of taking another person's life must be hugely upsetting. I'm hoping it's not something you do lightly, and is not without personal consequences (guilt,shame, shock,.. dunno).
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.
"Wait, this doesn't make sense", believe it or not, is not the default state of humanity, nor is it even the majority of our thoughts.
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).
> 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.
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 have a different take. Assuming his crime is driven by his beliefs/mission, not being found will not further it.
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.
> 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
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.
Welcome to Jungian Psychology and the wonderful world of enantidromia. As humans are General Intelligences, we're capable of entertaining contradictory courses of action/thinking at the same time. At some point our conscious faculties "meet" our unconscious faculties, and the period of time when the two start to integrate into a whole individual is a bit of a wild ride that practically no modern practitioner of psychology I've met seems to even be aware of anymore, and can absolutely go awry.
There is a hypothesis/philosophy called Society of Mind [1] which posits that our minds are a collection of individual 'agents' that each have their own motivations, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing.
> I think there was a part of those people who felt guilty and actually did want to be caught and punished.
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.
My guess is that he assumed he'd be caught early, wasn't, and then got a bit overwhelmed with the reality of staying on the loose. That would've been overwhelming: finding places to sleep, transport, eating, etc. A gun and ID might've felt like tools that still had use, so he was yet to discard them.
Why you'd eat-in at a fast food place rather than just go via some low level Chinese takeaway though!
True, but the general usefulness of noting prior submissions is that the principle discussion is / has occured there.
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.)
Yeah, there are screenshots of his LinkedIn floating around that show he apparently did Bugfixes on CIV 6. (The profile has since been scrubbed of course)
From the font and awkwarding positioning I'm guessing the date was overlayed on the video with a script or something (i.e. "two days after whenever this deadman's switch gets triggered")
It flashes "Dec 11th" at the 1:20 mark. I thought for sure this must be a prank, but the account says "Joined Jan 20, 2024". It seems it's possible to change your YouTube username, though. Could it be that it was a different account and someone just changed the username as a troll?
Apparently his other social media doesn't link to this YT account. Also there's an active "live premiere" which I don't think you can automate.
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
Probably was fake, but if it was real, not very smart of him to have it take so long. Should have been an immediate upload so people could download it.
Maybe he was thinking they would leave it up so police could use it as potential evidence.
It would have been a thumbnail of a magnet link to a torrent if anything
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.
There was one after McAffee died as well. I think there is a group who just does this. Costs nothing and if their shitcoin launches, they exit scam as quickly as they appeared. Probably the same people. There are people who fake recent obituaries to drive advertising traffic and rob peoples houses when they are at funerals. There are also people who withold lifesaving care and deny legitimate claims using bullying tactics. It's a dark world.
Confirmed as fake. CNN reports: "YouTube on Monday removed three channels belonging to Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as well as a channel that was altered Monday to look as if it belonged to him..."
"... 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.”
>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.”
I guess that's one way to get a LOT of clicks on your account.
I'm weirdly not too surprised due to this belief I have that software developers would make effective criminals. A lot of this boils down to a belief I have that not getting caught in the first place is easy. Murders have something like a 50% solve rate and you can decrease your chances of getting caught with a little knowledge on how to evade common forensic techniques along with some planning. Those who get caught doing one crime or another either were dumb to begin or eventually got lazy and made a dumb mistake in hindsight.
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.
Careful. That solve rate is overall. When planning your life in crime you probably want to use the solve rate for the particular type of people you plan to murder.
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.
Gang violence would often be random offender, random victim too. I imagine a motivated murder by a related party is significantly easier to solve than a random shooting where the perpetrator hightails it immediately.
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?
A lot of gang violence is at parties and (sadly) funerals. The demographics of the injured bystanders thus tend to reflect the demographics of people who attend those events.
- Gang-related homicides are less than 20% of all homicides in the US.
- 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.
> If it is true that 80% of non-white cases go unsolved [...]
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.
I remember reading something like this but in relation to elite overproduction, how if you have engineers sitting with their thumbs up their asses instead of working, they will disrupt society in a bad way
Overproduction theory, whether you believe it or not isn't really about engineers.
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
Im not saying it is impossible, so I dont see that as some sort of gotcha.
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.
Engineers are technicians/craftspeople, not elites. They are compensated well much of the time, and respected, which means that many of them have more opportunities to become elites, especially when considering the intelligence that engineering degrees tend to filter/correlate with.
You hadn't mentioned that your focus was on the USA, but rather a general "The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees" which is why I provided a paper that directly contradicts your statement. Elite Overproduction is not a US-specific topic, and the paper being from 2007 does nothing to invalidate its findings or lessen its relevance to Elite Overproduction.
Funnily enough, I hadn't checked astrange's reference that prompted this discussion, which is Gambetta and Hertog.
Probably fairly peaceful, intelligence or weirdness aren't at play here. The dangerous ones are those who deal in the practical realities of the world in ways that can effect change - they are more likely to have the means to do something. Engineers and chemists are ones to watch (whoever did the script for Breaking Bad knew his chemist stereotypes).
In my mind, the common threads with organize terrorism is utilitarianism and consequentialism. This way of thinking has a big overlap with stem fields based in logic and physics.
The perhaps concerning thread socially is the rise of utilitarian and consequentialist morality.
> More importantly, engineers are for some reason especially likely to be terrorists.
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.
Also, this assumes a similar demographic distribution to identified terrorists to unidentified ones. It's quite possible another class of people are more likely to be terrorists murders etc but don't show up in the data because for whatever reason they're better at hiding it.
"Engineers are more likely to be terrorists" is different from "terrorists are more likely to be engineers".
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.)
It's not Dunning-Kruger, it's because engineers have a very black-and-white view of the world. When they're engineering something, either it works according to specs or it doesn't. Also, engineers tend to be more religious and conservative for some reason; this is very different from scientists who are the opposite. I think this all works together somehow to make engineers more prone to extremism, to try to force the world to act the way they think it should.
"due to this belief I have that software developers would make effective criminals. A lot of this boils down to a belief I have that not getting caught in the first place is easy."
Ummm.... You understand that the software developer was just caught by a McDonald's cashier?
Murder is a really interesting crime. There are really two kinds of murder: those where the perpetrator and victim are known to each other and those where they are not. The first category is way more common [1]:
> 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.
I think it was insane to go somewhere like McDonalds or anywhere, even the Starbucks anytime near that time period. There was just no need. Unless he was toying with the idea of getting caught, surely he would have just gone to some prebooked motel type of thing somewhere far away and huddled in there for quite a bit.
You have to eat. If you're in a strange city with limited transportation options a fast food place seems pretty reasonable. I'd have probably taken the food to go, but realistically you can eat in ~15 minutes and depending on the route back to where you're staying you might be seen by fewer people.
Given enough resources dedicated to hunting you, it doesn't seem that easy to be sure, considering how many cameras there are, how easy it becomes to narrow down DNA considering services like 23andme etc.
Most murders wouldn't have this much resources dedicated to it though.
Location seems to be a factor. NYC has better statistics. Overall it is 54% since 2020. Washington DC had 1,088 murders, 559 clearances (51%) from 2020-2023. Baltimore is 1,042 and 315 (30%). NYC is notably better: 1,740 and 1,190, (68%). https://www.murderdata.org/p/blog-page.html
> Those who get caught doing one crime or another either were dumb to begin or eventually got lazy and made a dumb mistake in hindsight.
>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.
I think that, more generally, intelligent people don't get arrested for crimes for several reasons. First, because they are smarter, they just don't get themselves into jams where murdering someone seems like the best way to get out of the jam. Second, because they are more successful they have more to lose in terms of wealth, happiness, good living situation, so they risk more when choosing crime, so they're less likely to choose it. Only thirdly is actual proficiency in the planning and execution of the crime.
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.
Take a moment to refresh your memory of the Pol Pot regime. If half the population aren't literally getting bludgeoned to death in the streets, remember it can get so, so much worse, so tread carefully with accelerationist sentiments.
I feel like I've ripped off the bandaid for a few weeks now and I'm left with a 'now what?' feeling. I'm stuck trying to think of ways we can bring the temperature down and bring us back to being a civil society.
Part of the reason we established courts was to avoid angry mobs dispensing justice, but we've let the courts become captured to a large extent.
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.
My comment wasn’t about political capture, but about the capture of the courts by the wealthy class. Apologies if that wasn’t clear.
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.
I’d be open to ideas of reform. But so often the hot-takes I read online about “THE COURTS ARE RIGGED!1!1!” is simply one of disliking the ideological composition
Isn't it the legislative branch that is captured, rather than the judicial? 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). Insurance companies (mostly) don't actually break the law. It's the legislators that continue to fail to address our problems, and who get paid to look the other way while the working class is looted.
1) Not comparable crimes. One happens in broad daylight in front of everyone, and the other is an almost always a case of one person's word against another, and unreported.
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.
Abe Fortas was forced to resign for a conflict of interest. Now conservative members of SCOTUS openly receive gifts and vacations, and resist efforts to hold them accountable in any meaningful way.
Things are certainly worse, not just some minor political winds shifting.
By doing what Luigi did, until suddenly those who do have the power to change things start realizing that fixing things is a better option than having an angry mob.
Violence is very effective. The authorities use it to subjugate the population and the American military uses the threat of violence and the action of actual violence to keep the United States the way it is. Except when it is used by governments, it is often called defense and when it is used by the police it is often called 'keeping the peace'. Violence as a tool for revolution is quite effective -- only pacifism is strongly ingrained in us to make us "good citizens".
Violence certainly can be effective, but also not. Everything is situational. See the Black Panthers vs. peaceful protesting during the civil rights movement. See also the American Revolution. Whether or not violence makes sense likely depends on how strong you and your friends are.
This is also why the state apparatus like it incite violence in the opposition, this gives them authority to respond with violence.
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.
I wasn't suggesting that violence is ineffective. The French Revolution is an obvious example. I'm thinking about the "Reign of Terror" that followed though.
The French revolution was extremely ineffective. It turned a short term food crisis due to drought and hailstorms into a long term food crisis that lasted decades. It was a complete failure at addressing the suffering of the people, which only got better after they abandoned their revolutionary ideals, embraced an emperor, and raped and looted the rest of Europe.
In my post, I thought it was clear that I blamed the Napoleonic wars on the French revolution, carrying the resulting damage and suffering longer than that. An estimated 2 million French (more than 5% of France's population) died during the Napoleonic wars, and that obviously doesn't include the maimed, injured, or otherwise harmed.
Am I arguing? I didn't notice. I like Napoleon too and I'm intrigued that someone blames the casualties of the Napoleonic wars on the Revolution rather than, you know, Napoleon.
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.
Of course, it goes without saying. But at some point, I think one has to keep a certain restraint on that blame game. I think blaming the Revolution for Napoleonic wars causalities is crossing the threshold of acceptability.
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.
Yeah, I see what you mean but just take a much stronger approach. I think that France rampaging around the world was locked in with the French revolution and this is a bigger Factor than Napoleon himself.
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.
I'm not going to argue further on this line, I think we could see approximately where we'd end up agreeing. However, on this:
> 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.
I deeply appreciate the sentiments of the French revolutionary philosophers, and think we should strive for many of their ideals.
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.
Then I'm genuinely confused. The meaning of that sentence, to me, was that pillaging has helped with the famine. It would have been a sentence that was consistent with your previous one, except for the "decades" rounding error. Isn't it not what you meant?
yes, pillaging the rest of Europe helped with famine and other economic issues at home. This is consistent with claim of decades because we are looking at 1789-1815(ish) although I think the end is a blur, not line. The Consequences of actions cascade throughout the future, even to today, and just become more dilute as time passes on.
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.
You don't know beforehand what bold collective actions lead to. Abolishing slavery lead to a pretty ugly civil war in the US. Does it mean it wasn't worth it?
>Recent research suggests that nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based change than violent campaigns are, a somewhat surprising finding with a story behind it.
>The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media.
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.
1) The changes there are changes _within_ the system. That narrative only covers changes that are compatible with the industrial capitalist system. Indeed, the author focuses only on "transition to democracy". But I'd argue that nonviolent push for capitalism already has capitalism as a foregone conclusion because it is also more efficient, so even "doing nothing" can often bring it about.
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.
The change to democracy doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's the most likely system to come about due to an advance in technology. So people advocating for it are already swimming with the tide. Also, if a large majority want democracy, then it's more likely to happen, especially due to pressure from other countries who are also democratic and have a vested interest in democracy.
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.
>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.
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.
Violence creates a lot of problems, but it does solve some issues. Morals is a totally different topic, and whether "political opponents" will resort to violence is yet another 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.
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".
>Violence creates a lot of problems, but it does solve some issues. Morals is a totally different topic, and whether "political opponents" will resort to violence is yet another topic.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>in many respects it tells a certain class of people what they want to hear.
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.
It's quite effective at causing _something_ to happen, but what that something is isn't controllable; the volatility in outcome can be sculpted via a lot of different approaches, but smaller actors have fewer tools to sculpt the outcome. And it's very easy to enter a state of total commitment from both sides no matter the other costs, essentially forcing other systems to be sacrificed toward what is now a "totally committed conflict." This happens on the small scale (person to person) and on the large scale (state to state). Violence forces shifts in every facet and system at every scale, shifts towards total commitments to more violence. Violence is the final means of trying to enact social change; there's nowhere else to go.
Those who've lived total commitment to violence are it's loudest opponents. I hope we can continue to listen to their stories.
Depends how you define betterment. I'd say putting society under global capitalism was worse for society (especially native tribes, but everyone I'd argue).
Colonialism predated global capitalism, and there's always been various forms of trade routes and wars over the course of civilization, and likely going back far before then. Global capitalism has raised the standard of living over the past century.
Yet, violence is constantly used by governments and countries. If it is not effective why are the only surviving countries the ones who which have been willing to use violence?
> 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.
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.
Non-violent economic power is an extremely powerful tool within systems that restrict the use of force.
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.
> If the vast majority of the public actually agreed on something
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.
Such a huge ask, I think that most of western society is not in a state to be able to fulfil it. Especially in the US and UK (but probably many others), we've become so polarised that there's some kind of perceived honour in opposing the other 'side', regardless of your own actual opinion. If we needed to fight for suffrage today, for example, I don't think there would be a "vast majority", just two roughly equal sides taking opposing views for the sake of it.
Well, the internet has finally helped realize the politician's dream - making the voter believe that:
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
When the reality is:
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?
Do you have any idea just how bad a violent revolution in modern day America would get? The recent Civil War movie doesn't do it justice. I'm assuming anyone advocating for this has swallowed Russian propaganda.
I was there during the revolution in Ukraine.
Life isn’t the movies.
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
This is a great one. There were plenty of nonviolent protests in Syria throughout the years. They were executed and imprisoned without accomplishing a single thing.
People act based on incentives and disincentives. As of 2024, there are big incentives to cause great damage to society at large for pure personal gain in a manner like this CEO, with no disincentives.
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.
I don't think this is true. How many popular movies are war movies where the heroes are most certainly not pacifists? Even the movie starring a real-life pacifist (Hacksaw Ridge) is about how he, too, fit into the war machine.
First, I meant pacifism is promoted as the only recourse for the general citizen, not for the government. Of course, war movies promote the acceptability of violence by the state. Two totally separate phenomena.
The state promotes violence by the state, and being docile for the citizen.
Ok, but the word pacifism means something specific. I agree with your statement about docility, I think many would call it "civility." Same thing that black people were accused of, being "uncivil," when they were rioting for civil rights.
> I meant pacifism is promoted as the only recourse for the general 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?
Of course. Movies are an outlet to let off steam. We experience the violence in the theatre that is increasingly precisely because the pacified masses need a strong outlet to escape the lack of recourse for injustice in the real world.
This is a good explanation without supporting the idea that there is no propaganda of violence. There is. And btw, the US are one of the most violent advanced countries.
You're moving the goal posts. First you said that "pacifism is heavily promoted in mainstream media". When I pointed out that American mainstream media is absolutely riddled with "non-state invidualist hero uses personal violence to solve their problems", now you claim that the media is for "letting off steam".
> why pacifism is heavily promoted in mainstream media and society
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 see nothing wrong with this comment, what it's implying, predators want to be the only ones inflicting the damage and have its prey not defend itself.
I think Putin and his lackeys have exemplified this countless times in recent years. They perpetrate horrors but will cry foul when someone dares punch back.
He's basically correct though. This statement has also sat terribly with me. Especially given how much we glorify documents like the constitution or declaration of independence.
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.
> Countries like India are unique for gaining freedom without violence.
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.
What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.
Personally, I don't put a lot of weight on that. Particularly for people who are terminally online, the Unabomber manifesto is kinda "edgy content". A lot of these people want to come off as "edgy". He had Mein Kampf in his Goodreads profile too. Without other evidence, I don't think that really says anything either.
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.
Ted K's book is a lucid commentary on technology and society and recommends the dismantling of technological society. Not sure why it would be considered "edgy".
His x posts read like he was on an adderall bender.
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.
Have you, perhaps, had an adderall problem before? I have, and I used to say things like this a lot, but really I think its projection. How could you possibly know?
Filtered through the police and then through the media. It's a game of Chinese telephone and a lot gets lost in the translations, which leads to a huge amount of misinformation. Case in point b and t 9.
I agree. The media seemed to have jumped on the flirting angle because he was smiling. Isn’t that a little insulting to the hostel employee? I smiled at my barber today. Definitely wasn’t flirting.
If I am the employee, I don’t want my employer to think I’m flirting with customers when it’s just small talk. And..uhh..if I’m married, etc. Anyways, we don’t know for sure either way
Since the Millennial generation, pretty much, at least among the (over-)educated. It kills me; I'd prefer to pretend we're all participating in some shared project called "civilization".
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.
lol, those videos of the NYPD ‘searching’ Central Park look like my kids looking for a homework assignment they don’t want to turn in. Until the FBI got involved I thought he was pretty much off the hook.
Yes, he's not acting rationally because he's having a mental health crisis.
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!)
The Unabomber case was more complex to track [1]. I'm not suggesting it was because he had a higher IQ, as someone with an average IQ could have executed similar actions successfully.
It was also in a time where not everything got recorded. You have to think that having cameras everywhere and much more complex package tracking systems like we do now would have made staying hidden quite a bit harder.
He took his mask off at the hostel, the kind of place that often requires its employees to verify that a photo ID matches the holder’s face. “Let me see you smile” is a common thing that service employees learn to say to get strangers to take off their masks without angering them
Probably not a bot. Just reposting content from twitter over here.
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?
High, but not particularly rare. IF you see a movie, there are probably several people >130 in the audience with you. When you filter by education and other factors, it goes up quickly. Depending on your line of work, a majority of your coworkers might be over 130.
The road to hell is paved with smart people who think they can become experts in something just by reading some blog posts and thinking about the subject for a few hours. As one example, see successful poker players who become amateur economists, geneticists and virologists.
Not really. Half of people are barely literate. Maybe the top 10% have writing and language skills cogent and coherent enough to hang out on a website like this. So realistically we're talking about maybe 20% of the people you're interacting with. Possibly more, since this is the modern USENET where all the shape rotators hang out. People who can rotate shapes at all probably score at least that on tests.
I don't know that means anything, I score well above 130, yet I will likely make ton of mistakes even if thought it about it and planned for months.
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
I am sure the various other parts of judiciary too, bribing takes skill, knowing who to bribe, how to make them vulnerable to bribery and so on, all these are important street skills that a criminal of his stature has to have. IQ doesn't teach you those
Putting on my tinfoil hat for this: It sounds like parallel construction to me. I wonder if the FBI doesn't want it to get out what kind of technology the US government can use to track citizens in real time. Something like 24/7 facial recognition running in major chains like McDonalds.
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.
I don't think they should tell people exactly how much tech they have. Why give people intelligence briefs on your capabilities? The point is to catch criminals and terrorists. If those criminals and terrorists believe that Palantir or whatever is the most they need to worry about, then society has the advantage.
The point is to define who a "criminal" and a "terrorist" is and use that as justification for mass surveillance. Palantir is far worse for me as a US citizen than any "terrorist".
Right. Transparency is a really important aspect of a functioning democracy. Without it, there’s less and less separating democracy from authoritarianism
If they solve every murder then they make it obvious. Maybe they just solve the ones involving millionaire victims and let the murders of the poors go unsolved.
This has been my thought over and over as this. has been going on. So many people are murdered in this country and this one murder probably got 1000x the resources applied to it compared to the rest. Justice should be impartial so this case makes it look like some people's lives are more important than others.
With justice and healthcare, people are absolutely, explicitly, and intentionally treated differently based on their position in society. If you’re a CEO you get treated 1000x better.
> makes it look like some people's lives are more important than others.
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.
It also seems like there might have been some "regular police work" going on at the beginning but when that didn't work fast enough, some bigger tools were called in.
No need for conspiracy here. I'd be surprised at this point if McDonald's wasn't running that type of software on all their cameras 24/7 and using to better profile their customers. Is there actually a law against it? There should be, but is there? It likely isn't hard and I am positive the data could be useful to them in many ways so if they aren't then it would only be because they thought it wasn't legal.
Now I'm feeling really paranoid about finding a McDonald's ordering kiosk broken mid-software-update on Friday 6th: I bet that was when they were updating the facial recognition tech to spy and track everyone walking past. :p
The guy's face has been plastered over the news for several days and there's a $60,000 reward. Getting a tip from a fast food worker is very plausible.
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.
People vastly overestimate the ability of giant bureaucracies to keep secrets. It only works if a few people are in on it (that's part of what compartmentalization is for). I'm always suspicious of claims that federal agencies are colluding with companies for the purposes of mass surveillance because while I trust those agencies to keep secrets, I absolutely do not trust the vast majority of companies to do so. There are narrow exceptions--defense industry, telecommunications, aerospace industry--but mostly secrets like that are hard to keep unless your org is built around keeping secrets. The orgs I've worked for are the opposite of compartmentalized. I doubt McDonalds' software engineering org is, but I'd be curious to be surprised!
Yeah I think it's very easy to forget we live in a surveillance state. Periodically something happens that lets us see it but we somehow, as a society, stop talking about it and next time something like this happens we're surprised.
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.
That's the sort of thinking that helps them get caught. McVeigh was initially caught because his car didn't have a license plate and he had a concealed weapon. If he'd had an ordinary vehicle with a tag and no weapon, he wouldn't have been found so quickly and might have even evaded capture for years (even if his identity as the bomber were discovered).
He was always going to be the fall guy. The groups he was involved in was full of federal informants and agents. Why such elements didn't try to stop him is another question for a FOIA that won't be returned for 100 years.
A gun perhaps, not the same gun used in the murder, that would be dumb to be caught with evidence directly connecting you with the murder. This is America, getting guns is not that hard. Gun owners tend to usually own more than one.
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.
No, not at all. You're extremely unlikely to win a shootout in the event law enforcement catches you, and having a gun makes it much more likely you get arrested and convicted. But even if a gun seems worth it, it should absolutely not be the famous murder weapon you just used! I mean, JFC, keeping the distinctive murder weapon on himself was either incredibly dumb or something shady is going on with the story.
This post is dumb in many ways not worth listing. And because of that, I realized I just read something nearly word-for-word on twitter (@peruvian_bull). Is that you or is this just copy pasta?
..And he was smart enough to ditch the burner phone, clothes, and the backpack but he kept the untraceable weapon and the fake ID? Seriously what..? I hope we'll learn something that brings this all to a sensible narrative but here and now it seems like completely incoherent behavior.
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.
I don't think modern health insurers want to lower costs. Middlemen benefit from an increase in costs because they operate by skimming off the cashflows passing through them. This has been codified with the 85-15 rule in the ACA but there were less formal incentives pointing broadly in the same direction even before then. If you take a fixed percentage of every dollar you get, you're going to want to get more dollars.
So one of the problems is indeed that insurers have conflicting incentives, as you correctly described one of them, and it's possible (although I don't know enough to argue either way) that ACA actually made this worse. I think one of the big arguments for a single-payer system, or at least the "public option," is that those middlemen could (ideally, in theory) embrace the position they're in to fight for lower costs without the conflicting incentives that come with being a for-profit entity. I guess that's basically what Noah Smith (author of the parent's linked article) is saying in his conclusion. There are, of course, other arguments for and against. Healthcare is a fascinatingly (and maddeningly) complex problem.
I agree this is a bad incentive, but a conflict of interest alone does automatically mean an ability to act on it.
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 incentives go both ways. In the short term, the minimum medical loss ratio rule incentivizes payers to approve more claims and allow network providers to charge higher rates. But longer term payers can only maintain market share with their most important customers (the large self-funded employers) by lowering total medical expenses.
Kind of a silly take in my opinion. While it's may be true that the majority of money in a medical transaction (which is inflated) doesn't go to the insurer, it goes to the provider, it doesn't change the fact that "insurers" absolutely add a layer of uncertainty to the process. In times of uncertainty (ie: getting sick) anything that adds uncertainty will rightfully be hated.
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.
Now, why doesn’t the United States have universal public healthcare? Because every time it’s been proposed since the 19th century there’s been stiff opposition from doctors, hospital owners, and private insurance companies. So while it’s true that they didn’t start the problem, it’s fair to blame all of them for the problems of a system they’ve poured enormous amounts of money into preserving.
The US doesn't have universal public healthcare because it is a country of 350M people and would probably be a disaster. Significantly smaller countries (UK/Canada) have major issues with their systems with a fraction of the population.
That’s just silly. What mechanism do you believe makes healthcare fall apart in a larger country but not, say, the larger EU? Similarly, these alleged major problems don’t seem to show up in stats where residents of those countries live longer and healthier lives at much lower cost, and medical bankruptcy is rare.
The EU is not one country. It is certainly not one healthcare system.
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.
> The EU is not one country. It is certainly not one healthcare system.
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.
I didn't say it was the best that we can do, merely that I don't think humans currently have the capacity to manage a project of that nature and scope effectively.
My alternate proposal would be for states to implement public healthcare on their own, which they can already do.
> Yes, why don't we already have public healthcare per state?
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?
Humanity is what prevents scaling. We've demonstrated time-and-time again that we struggle to administer something at scale without the benefit of free market dynamics like supply and demand.
Nope, no hard border. Just progressively more difficult (and not linearly). My assumption is that, because any such large-scale human endeavor is a network, the complexity increases by some superlinear rate with size unless a almost superhuman effort is effected to counteract that.
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.
I would actually say it can only scale linearly or slower than that. Either you gain efficiency due to economies of scale, or worst case, you make 10 smaller systems.
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.
10 smaller systems then require a layer on top to manage those 10 systems. Now you have 11 systems. And there definitely won't be only 2 layers in your public healthcare system for 300M people across 50 different states.
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?
I think most of what you said is on the mark, but the core problem is still what the providers are charging. I wouldn't worry so much about in/out-of-network or claim denials, and might not even worry about having insurance coverage at all, if: a 90-minute ER visit (even for a false alarm) didn't cost $10k; or if one night in the hospital (just for observation and a couple blood tests) didn't cost $50k; or if anything actually serious didn't cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
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.
It's the healthcare industrial complex. Just like the military. You get back some percentage of what you charge. They're incentivized to charge more because they'll get more, and sometimes it's an all-or-nothing.
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.
He's not the only person being compensated at United Healthcare though.
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?
As a counterpoint to many of the other commenters, it is 100% true that providers way overcharge for healthcare in the US. Specialized nurses and doctors have salaries that exceed nearly every other profession in the US. But they are not even the main employees! The healthcare industry in the US employs a substantial chunk of all of America, largely in bloated administrative jobs that aren't really necessary for patients.
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.
This is a bit ridiculous, because part of the reason that providers are overcharging you is that they need huge finance departments to get their cash back from you or your insurer, which wouldn't be necessary if you had a single government insurer.
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.
Imo, spherical cow economist take on a field they know little about. The graphic lumps all "Inpatient & outpatient care" together, which is insane. Is it saying all that money is going to physicians, nurses, etc? It seems to imply that, but my guess is much of it ends up in hospital administration costs. Also in this way the cost of UHC etc isn't just their own admin overhead; it also add the hospital's admin and billing costs of dealing with them.
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.
Btw, there are good ways of reducing physician costs. Allow straight to med school with no college, reduce med school requirements, maybe let residents change programs. If you make it much easier to become a physician without hurting care too much you then naturally pass savings on to patients. You can have legitimate criticisms of the AMA or hospital administration without jumping to ah greedy providers.
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[ 276 ms ] story [ 1371 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/lnmangione
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
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...
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.
Come on.
https://www.facebook.com/luigi.mangione.2
> Fixed over 300 UI bugs (25% of UI bug count) using Lua language, Jira software, and Perforce version-control system
(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.
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.
https://genius.com/Peter-gabriel-not-one-of-us-lyrics
So when they said they knew who he was yesterday it was a lie.
Or, if we're being really charitable, they were chasing the wrong guy.
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.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unlocked-eric-adams/id...
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Non-profit doesn’t mean what it seems to imply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Who has a greater moral accountability to the public - politicians or corporate CEOs?
The correct answer is “both, they are willing accomplices”.
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.
When the options are deny healthcare to someone that has paid you for healthcare and give them the healthcare, it's not morally grey.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
You’ve never been an oncology patient apparently. They don’t see it as ‘profit’ at all, they are trying to save lives.
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.
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.
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?
That's a tremendously generous way of saying, "Many of their customers are dead because the company opted for profit over treatment".
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?
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.
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
[1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/UNH:NYSE?hl=en&window=M...
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.
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“.
This is hideous.
https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
[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.
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_(video_game)
https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/blee/
And boy howdy, the sparks will fly then
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CiVFn1vEIiM
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42332688
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.
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.
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.
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 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")
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.
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.
The stuff found on him is irrelevant, they'd pin him down with dna and whatever other evidence.
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 would bet a lot of the healthcare CEO's are totally surprised that anyone would want to harm them.
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.
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.
They're (attempts at) a bon mot
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bon_mot
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.
Trial for this could be hugely publicized
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)
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.
I wonder if cops were monitoring major news offices because of this.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/search-new-york-subway-gunm...
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.
I assumed he had some help with the timing via the burner phone
But this all looks very lone wolfish now
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.
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
2. This guy has a terminal illness.
3. This guy is bankrupt after healthcare debt + buying backpacks.
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.
[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 "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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
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.
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.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42374292>
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.)
What? Do they mean Firaxis? Devs of some Civilization and X-Com versions?
https://youtube.com/@PepMangione
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
Probably is fake, can someone decode the binary in the thumbnail? I can't ATM.
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?
“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.
"... 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.”
I guess that's one way to get a LOT of clicks on your account.
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...
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
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.
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.
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.)
Ummm.... You understand that the software developer was just caught by a McDonald's cashier?
> 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...
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.
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.
On top of that, he's going to pardon everyone convicted for that insurrection, and wants to attack the Jan 6 committee somehow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/why-nonviolen...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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...
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?
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.
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!)
https://github.com/lnmangione
...."Active" GitHub?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
</tinfoil>
>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.
It's just too high profile, everybody would be on the case, all the experts in everything.
https://x.com/peruvian_bull/status/1866213955687022656
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.
https://github.com/lnmangione
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.
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?
Well they both are
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpQCiLi_mHg