- person clearly had meticulously planned the execution of the hit and exfiltration. Even leaving red herrings on his way out of the city (backpack full of Monopoly money). Yet clumsily keeps _all_ of the evidence that would implicate himself in this murder. Not to mention he is wandering about in public while a multi-state manhunt is underway with the full weight of alphabet soup agencies, and state and local LEOs? To me, this suggests it was part of his plan to get caught. There was no escape to a non-extradition country. The “shaking” mentioned while talking with police could just be a massive surge of adrenaline as he sees his plan unfold before his eyes. Then use the live streamed and televised court to spread his message. Then live out the rest of his life as a political figure as the media continue to analyze this persons life and motivations. Just like Ted.
- Or the internet, media really over-estimated this persons competence. It was really just dumb luck that he even escaped NYC. At that point, he was just improvising after leaving NYC. His arrogance to keep the evidence as some sick mementos or trophies ultimately did him in. Likely try to plead insanity with the manifesto. Probably fail to do so, then eventually get convicted on all charges and end up in a supermax penitentiary for life.
This looks like a case of "suicide by revolution". Various media reports (including this one) suggest that he had a back injury in 2023, has not worked since 2023, started losing touch with friends in 2023, has been reading books about back injuries and chronic pain, etc. If you've ever known someone dealing with chronic pain, it can easily make you decide that you're better off dead than continuing to live. Likely he's been seeking medical treatment for his injury, his insurer is United Health, they've done nothing but "delay, deny, defend", he's already decided that he's better off dead, and he might as well take the CEO of the health insurer with him.
> If you've ever known someone dealing with chronic pain, it can easily make you decide that you're better off dead than continuing to live
I'll confirm it for you right now. For me it's not just the back, it's areas along the entire spine. I've had spinal cord compression on my thoracic spine since late 2017 and nobody will touch it. My lumbar spine has many herniations and "schmorl's nodes" (where it's chipping away at the actual vertebrae) in addition to clamping my nerve roots shut. I had emergency surgery in my neck in early 2018. Prior to the thoracic spine injury, I was in the best shape of my life; very muscular and healthy with a 6-pack like you see in Luigi's pictures.
It's been an absolute miserable experience for the last 8 years. Being gaslighted by doctors before and after my surgery didn't help. Insurance tried to deny my emergency surgery at first despite the fact I lost all sensation from the neck down almost overnight. When you're dealing with trauma and the system works against you, very dark thoughts start to form. I'm not going to say I condone what Luigi did, but if you think people go through these events and don't think those thoughts on many occasions, you're so very wrong. There's a HUGE range of emotions that comes with it all. Suicide was definitely one of them for a long time as well. I have a wife and kids though and do not wish to burden them further by adding to the list of problems. They're the only things that's kept me going strong this whole time.
But he’s not dead, he’s going to prison. Does he plan to commit suicide behind bars? He’ll probably be on tighter watch than Epstein - that’s what happens when you mess with the ruling class.
It wouldn't be the first time the police/three letters agencies lie about how they identified/located a suspect to not leak potentially illegal surveillance processes
It seems far more likely to be a case of incompetence. Law enforcement actually has an extremely low rate of "solving" cases, especially if you exclude all the "solved" cases where the suspect is caught on scene or that end in a plea bargain (i.e. did not have to establish sufficient evidence in the first place).
Ever since he got "caught" (if you can call someone literally telling the police where he is "the police catching him"), all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" (i.e. attempting to demonstrate that a bullet was not only fired from a given type of gun but a specific singular gun of that type) and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him. They might actually be lucky and produce matches in this case as they have the actual suspect and murder weapon (assuming this wasn't an extremely unlikely 5D chess move of using a body double fall guy and/or different gun) but both of these types of evidence are extremely unreliable and rarely help actually finding the suspect even if they make for good television when they work. As I understand it the police even walked back on the mayor's initial claim about "having a name" to "having a list of names" - not to mention that you don't call in the FBI when you already have good leads yourself (if only for optics/political reasons).
He seems to have been mentally unstable for a while before engaging in this killing and the fact he wrote a manifesto strongly suggests he had an intention of being caught or at least considered it highly likely. The monopoly money bag wasn't necessarily a "red herring" as everyone I heard talk about it interpreted it as intending to send a message, which seems to agree with the apparent contents of his manifesto (based on what news reports have cited from it). The water bottle the police now wants to use for DNA evidence may have been deliberately left there for this purpose, too.
Based on what I've heard of his manifesto, he may have intended to kill other people too but have realized the difficulty involved given that his very public first killing likely spooked the other people on his list. I think it's more likely he didn't fully plan out an entire sequence of killings or didn't account for these complications and essentially gave up, settling on being caught sooner rather than later. People generally don't write manifestos when they don't also want to take credit for their actions.
Neither of your theories answer the question -- how did he know that the CEO was staying in a hotel other than Hilton (conference venue) and would arrive by foot 1 hour and 15 minutes before conference opens at 8am (CEOs do not typically arrive so early in advance). The shooter was caught on camera talking on a burner phone 15 minutes before shooting. Who did he talk to? Was he acting alone or received some help? The shooter only had to wait for 15 minutes or so before his target arrives. Pure "luck" or help from inside?
This is my sticking point as well. The bullet messages only made sense for this specific guy and that’s a whole lot of work to engrave bullets, take a multi-state bus ride, camp out in a hostel, etc if you’re not 100% sure the guy is going to be there.
I’d feel more confident if he’d staked the route out for multiple days or if there was a plausible backup plan like breaking in to the CEO’s hotel or the conference.
There are plenty of plausible explanations, but it probably wouldn't have been a huge lift to get Thompson's itinerary from his secretary by spearfishing or some other form of social engineering.
> CEOs do not typically arrive so early in advance
But they may well have arranged other, small meetings with people also attending the same annual meeting. It's then convenient to have them all in the same hotel.
>media really over-estimated this persons competence
It is a bit of psychological blindness where we convince ourselves that random murders aren't as easy as they really are. The truth is that almost anyone -- including people with lots of security theater -- can be nullified by random people. This is quadruply true in the era of drones.
We came within a literal inch of witnessing the assassination of a presidential candidate earlier this year, by a kid with no particular skills and an easily obtained rifle. We are lucky that people are mostly nonviolent.
> Or the internet, media really over-estimated this persons competence.
definitely this one. there was a lot of projection of competency onto him, wanting him to be some kind of superhero assassin that would disappear. when in reality, he wasn't using that welrod pistol clone, and his gun was jamming with every shot.
but also he was self-destructive and definitely wasn't trying hard enough to not get caught. and that comes with the territory because you're not going to be well-adjusted and decide to assassinate someone in broad daylight. and i would pick self-destructive over arrogant. and he may just have not realized how distinct his facial features were.
He knew it was going to jam because he didn't have a proper device on his suppressor. He's not surprised that he has to rack the slide after every shot, he knows that it most likely will not cycle and he'll have to work it manually and he reaches immediately to do it.
It never made sense to me why he was wandering around the city in the same exact clothes he used during the murder. If he had simply worn another jacket, he may never have been identified. How could he not have realized he'd be on camera or described by witnesses?
Now he gets caught with all the incriminating evidence you could ask for? I'd say Occam's Razor points to your second theory: He's not playing some sort of 4D chess. He just decided to go kill this guy for some reason and went and did it. Dumb luck and a dense population easily explains how he was able to escape the city.
That's the part that baffles me. Whenever something like this happens I re-engineer the planning as a mental exercise. I have never had any interest in offing anybody, but I never understand not having a plan and a basic disguise. The guy had IDs, but he also did nothing to hide his p[articular characteristics. If he had thinned his eyebrows and worn fake glasses and kept his mask on he'd likely still be at large. I would have ditched or reversed the jacket right away and thrown on a hat at the very least.
My guess is he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his emotional state after pulling the trigger. He probably immediately regretted the decision and half heartedly followed some sort of escape plan.
I imagine a person who stays at the crime scene after shooting someone several times is in much higher danger of being shot himself than if he flees and is captured later.
He probably didn’t want to get caught until he saw millions of people were on his side, then he changed his mind. Smart move imho. He started a movement he probably didn’t anticipate.
If he wanted to get caught, he didn't need to wear a disguise all the way from Georgia or wherever he came from. He didn't need to use a fake ID. He didn't need to flee the scene - at least, flee outside the city.
Why would he do all that if he wanted to get caught?
Educated people tend to overestimate their abilities outside their domain. We've all known someone with an "I can do anything" complex. Anyone can do anything... poorly. He likely deluded himself into believing he already outsmarted the cops so why even bother. Having two degrees doesn't make one a competent plumber, electrician, or in this case, criminal.
>Educated people tend to overestimate their abilities outside their domain.
This. And HN is the perfect example to observe this phenomenon.
I lost track how many highly confident but incorrect takes I read here on semiconductor topics from people who assumed they know everything about any tech topic because they earn sich figures from writing crud web software.
Looking at his tweets he looks like a perfect example of a smug “TPOT” postrationalist that identifies themselves as “gray tribe” and then mainlines figures like Bret and Eric Weinstein and has retrograde views.
Thinking he’s smarter than the rest of us is most likely a big part of his identity.
To be fair, if you are very smart / quite determined to pick up a skill / have a good mentor, you can get good enough in a lot of skills, that you can pass off your work as professional quality.
I have seen this happen people do this with programming / CAD / 3D modeling / various crafts etc.
The reverse where people project insane complexity onto everything they don't understand is also true and common.
You see this all the time where people on HN, Reddit, wherever, will act as though roughing in the plumbing and electrical for a home addition is comparable in complexity and fraught with similar nuances as doing all the process electrical and plumbing for an industrial facility when it very much not.
It seems implausible that he was competent enough to locate his target and escape the day of yet so incompetent as to hold onto the gun. I think he definitely wanted to get caught.
I’m curious about what exactly prompted whoever called him in to become suspicious - was the profile released from photos good enough? Or was he acting suspiciously with his backpack?
I don’t think people are over-estimating his competence. He set himself a goal and achieved it… getting away with it simply wasn’t important so it wasn’t the thing he obsessed over.
Although, if the evidence is damning and you don't want it found, keeping it on your person is not the worst idea. That way you know the only way they find any evidence is if they find you.
Even if you try to destroy the evidence, evidence of you destroying the evidence works just as well for a lot of cases.
The most likely scenario is that he was planning on not getting caught, saw the massive amount of support he had, then decided to attach his name to his actions.
- The intelligent individual is also self-absorbed and believed that they would be able to continue to kill CEOs without getting caught. A narcissistic streak that allowed them to make no attempt at concealing their identity in public. They kept the weapon in order to move to a new target (or they 3D printed an identical if the reports of a 3D printed gun are correct). They believed they would either not get caught or that the public would not turn them in. They may have envisioned themselves the Ted of Healthcare.
Disposing of evidence can sometimes be more incriminating than not.
Let's say he shuts up and gets a lawyer. His lawyer can say that maybe the real gunman noticed he looked similar, then switched bags on a bus. It's weak, but it's something.
If he tossed it in NYC, he leaves possible DNA at the scene. If he tosses it at home, the cops will likely find it and take his disposal as an admission of guilt.
IANAL but while I guess it's not good to have your lawyer run the Shaggy defence ("it wasn't me!") if the police have made an effort in the investigation then there's a surprising chance they'll find the evidence anyway.
At the very least that could be his rationale.
He didn't know if they had a van watching his house, and if his bins were being collected by the police. He might have been too scared and paranoid to do anything.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Usually I don't tend to get caught up in stories like this. But one thing has me completely fascinated, is how far off the deep end the internet went over the last few days. A murderer became a cult hero online. I saw many posts even suggesting "the snitch" should be hunted down and get what's coming to him/her.
I try not to overreact to stuff online, but this took me a bit by surprise. Things really feel like a melting pot at the moment, with so much pent up anger amongst people who actually lead pretty decent lives.
It's because the whole image is fake. In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, and the power of an institution to decide about someone else's life or death is just one aspect of it; prices inflated beyond imagination is another one (these two are related). So we pretend to live normal lives but in the back of our head we pray we don't ever need to become a victim of this system. But on the outside yes, it looks like everything is fine and we have decent lives.
Its because the generally applicable standard way globally to know if things are bad for someone, doesn't work in US. Most people have homes, there is a car standing outside, they have clothes to wear, people are generally private (due to high focus on individualism) and unless you try, you can't really overhear your neighbour - so these issues hide behind closed doors.
The problem is I don't see any "easy" solution to this issue, simply because there will always be an institution in place to decide about someone else's life our death.
Be it a privately run for profit insurance system that runs on perverse incentives, or a government agency that runs on power and influence and corruption.
I can explain my perspective which echos kinda what you say.
I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good.
My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance.
However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore.
The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved.
After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back.
Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids.
The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked.
She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed.
BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later.
You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........
You just described one of quite a few reasons (higher education falls into same category, overall security could be mentioned in such topic too) that I consider some parts of western Europe a better place to live and raise kids than anything US can provide. Despite having much lower numbers on paychecks alone.
I get that system needs to push folks into working hard and motivate exceptional efforts (and luck), but sometimes this goes into properly bad directions where few gain and majority loses. In any functional society, all this is never isolated and it has ripple effects.
You can leave! Nothing is stopping you from staying in the US. Particularly if you're on this website, you probably have talents other countries would like to acquire. The fact that you haven't says you don't believe what you say.
It’s funny how we treat these things. Kill a bunch of people by putting lead in their drinking water and it’s a shrug. Occasionally you might lose your job over it. In extremely rare and egregious cases you might end up with a minor criminal conviction.
Kill one person by putting lead in their heart at high speed and now it’s a serious crime. If the victim is Important then you get a massive manhunt and national news coverage.
I'm not sure people are actually leading pretty decent lives. The people I know are working stressful dead end jobs and living with roommates in order to barely make ends meet. They don't have much prospect of improving their lot because doing so requires capital that they don't have (e.g. to start a business or go to college). Even though they have health insurance, they avoid going to the doctor unless absolutely necessary because they can't afford the co-pay. In some cases the states that they live in actively seek to discriminate against them.
It seems that people are increasingly convinced that “in this country it is necessary, now and then, to put one health insurance exec to death in order to inspire the others to pay”.
That is a sign that people believe they can't obtain redress through widely available legal means.
What you are looking at is the people checking the power of the institutions they tasked with providing legal recourse who have mostly been sitting on their hands and/or serving parties other than the people.
If the state, courts and other systems don't get people justice or something you can squint at and call justice when they are wronged some fraction of those wronged will go outside the systems and seek to get even instead.
Public sympathy for the (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what gives the parts of the institutions that want to do what the people want the political capital to something other than the status quo.
I, and probably a lot of people reading this on HN, are outwardly very comfortable.
I have cash/assets that would be life changing for most people (especially when I read comments on reddit where people say that $10k would be life changing for them) - and a "good" white-collar job.
I'm also lucky enough to be old enough to have not been 100% screwed like our even younger generation has (I only got 90% screwed).
I've been very lucky in life, but when I see the level of wealth inequality and how corporations have completely captured our government, and our two-tiered justice system, it makes me feel sick and angry.
I still feel like I'm being held hostage by the 0.1%, under pressure to keep working to line other's pockets for much longer than I would otherwise have to, and like the whole thing could all come crashing down in a week's time given some improbable but far-from-impossible set of circumstances.
I also don't feel like I would be supported by my government, corporations, or society in general if those circumstances actually occurred.
So I definitely sympathize with the frustration of people who feel unsupported by society and unrepresented by government - especially those who happened to be unluckier in life than I.
And with the current state of affairs, there must be a LOT of them around.
I sympathize with that frustration a hell of a lot more than I sympathize for a dead CEO who made a career out of systematically denying treatment to people who paid him for coverage.
In fact, I'm happy he died as a reminder that nobody is untouchable, no matter how much lobbying your corporation has done to make social murder legal, and no matter how much you've tried to isolate yourself from the consequences of your terrible actions.
I read a reddit comment about the alleged shooter's arrest before:
"murder is such a strong word, can't we just call it removing a cancer?"
> how far off the deep end the internet went over the last few days.
Side note - the "internet" is very likely a mix of bots and real humans nowadays. What might seem initially like a real person saying "hunt the snitch down" could very likely be a bot that is meant to sow and influence discord. That bot's followers could very likely be real people who then say "ya i agree with this account! get your pitchfork!"
This is generally true but I've never seen clear evidence of bot activity on HN – have you? I think it's very likely that those reactions on Twitter are 50/50 bot, but I've seen HN people posting their own version of "wow, what a guy" in ways that were convincingly human and very surprising.
Bots don't independently invent opinions separate from the people running them. Not even with LLMs. "Bots" are just sock puppets - people creating multiple identities for themselves so they can ballot-stuff the Court of Public Opinion.
So it's not so much that there are no real people who want to hunt down the snitch, but that there's a very loud minority of performative extremists with an army of sock puppet accounts who want to hunt down the snitch.
Unfortunately, sometimes the law allows for the legal murder of people by pen. More people are killed by keyboards and pens, and I don't mean like John Wick, than are killed by guns because we have "for-profit healthcare". That means that the motive of the company is not determined by whether their decisions will kill people by the policies they create, but whether the decisions they make will be profitable. As long as those decisions don't run afoul of the law, they can kill at will. If that sounds fucked up, it is because it is fucked up.
And one reason it's pent-up, as opposed to released, is due to corporations taking over our society and ruining human lives. All within the confines of the law and democracy. That's what this is about. There is no recourse or effective vehicle to be heard.
I take it as a reaction to the wider public feeling that the US medical system is broken and the appropriate channel to fix it (voting & politics) being broken too thanks to lobbying.
Under circumstances like this people’s perception shifts to a more relativistic perspective. A bit like perception of a rioter throwing a stone at riot police depends on whether the viewer agrees with the movements goals even if in isolation they wouldn’t normally approve of throwing rocks at people faces.
I imagine that's what the start of the French revolution felt like too - one day you could walk down the streets of Paris as a noble minding your own business, the next day you had your head chopped off because people got fed up. Not saying that this is what's happening in the US right now, but I imagine the societal feelings of anger against "the elite" are similar.
I thought it was a joke when I saw the posts on the Reddit homepage celebrating the murder and even the murderer. Partly because I thought Redditors were above that type of thing, but also because I thought it was against their TOS.
It's a real reminder of how little sympathy people can have about people who they consider the enemy or the "other". I'm almost certain nearly all of the people celebrating the murder believe that they're good people and believe in justice too. Humans are so flawed. And I'm not suggesting for a moment I'm above it. I've often noticed how I don't care as much as I should when someone I dislike is harmed or suffers injustice.
A lot of people feel that he as the CEO of the health insurance with the highest rate of denied claims is indirectly responsible for the death of a large number of people. Thus killing him is justified as vigilante justice. And vigilante justice is frequently seen in a positive light when the justice system is unable or unwilling to act.
I was even more surprised by the response on Bluesky because I naively expected it to be 'better' than that. But I saw vitriol and hatred directed at people for daring to suggest that other, unrelated CEOs shouldn't be shot. It was like a reflection of the worst elements of X, even though these people claim to be the 'good' side.
some people believe the CEO's death is justice. engels called what insurance companies do "social murder" where these institutions and the state commits violence against individuals or kills them through policy or profit motives. and it's perfectly legal. it's only when an individual uses self defense against this social violence that it is considered wrong.
Honest question, do you think there is a point where someone has earned death? For example, was the mission to kill Bin Laden wrong? Was the mission to kill the Iranian General in Iraq wrong? Is it wrong to kill someone via the death penalty for the rape and murder of a child? Many people fundamentally believe those things are good examples of killing other humans. And realistically, those people are responsible for less harm and suffering , not to mention deaths, that CEOs of healthcare providers being investigated by the DoJ.
It’s not that there. Is a lack of sympathy, it’s overwhelmed by the feeling of justice. And not the injustice you think occurred.
The actions of his company —which he led and dictated policy for— can be considered evil by a reasonably dispassionate measure - they deliberately caused undue suffering or shortened the life of countless thousands of vulnerable people.
I (obviously) don’t support vigilante justice, and felt somewhat sad when Hussein and Gadaffi were hanged/lynched because despite their evil, I’d rather we don’t treat human beings like that.
But I don’t think it’s hyperbole to consider the actions of this CEO and his company in the same breath as such evil tyrants; and as such, I can understand why many might be happy about what took place, especially if they had personal animus with the company.
This overall dynamic has become very concerning to me- people have sorted themselves into echo chambers online that dehumanize anyone not in their group- to the point of justifying murder for just for not being in their specific group. This has happened universally across the political and ideological spectrum. Parts of Reddit for example has a seething hatred for anyone elderly “boomers” and/or well off “billionaires and landlords” with lots of extreme essays on why people in these groups should be systematically harmed or even executed becoming well liked. Anyone adding nuance to the discussion is attacked- empathy and nuance are labeled as themselves evil. Everything is based on a cartoonishly oversimplified model of the world with pure good and evil actors- not understanding that unfair outcomes are most often simply the banal result of bad planning and locked in structures that appear organically and can persist even when everyone involved wants them to change but can’t coordinate well. This dynamic is repeated everywhere and not unique to just the right or left. Nothing good will come off this.
On the one side you have a mass murderer that’s part of the politically untouchable class, and on the other, one of his permanently injured victims managed to survive and deal out frontier-style justice.
It makes for a good story. We’ve all seen that movie 100 times.
I wonder if the shooter will survive long enough to make it to jury trial. That’s when the real circus will begin.
(All I know about this story is that United Health has one of the highest incorrect claim rejection rates in the industry. I know nothing about the CEO, but we’re way past 140 characters at this point, so these things don’t matter to social media.)
Yes, probably. But I don't think we're at an actual tipping point. I don't think we're about to see a breakdown or anything like that, soon, but we're certainly heading in that general direction.
What is the euphemism I'm actually looking for? Knife edge? No.
It's not surprising. Most people don't comment. The tiny minority that comment likely have extreme views. Sorting algorithms that drive engagement makes this worse.
It's everywhere. You're simply wrong. Sort by date, sort by score, look on any broader news story and check out the comments. They're not "extreme", either. Even if their content was, which it isn't, it still wouldn't be extreme by definition at this point.
It's kind of sad. But I think that most people are fundamentally good -- they're just reactive and understand our broken healthcare system so little that they actually consider the victim to have actually earned a death sentence. When really, he was still a cog in the machine, not much closer to harming people than a software developer whose code ends up being used in military drones.
The problems with US healthcare boil down to there being more demand for healthcare than supply, and a fat bureaucracy sprouting up to partition that limited healthcare, often screwing over people who need exceptionally special care or who can't afford insurance in the first place. Who is to blame? You could reasonably apply some blame to the shortage of doctors created by the AMA, the FDA's guidance and the sugar industry's lobbying resulting in people being less healthy, lack of consumer protection laws around opaque medical pricing/gouging, and private insurance.
Would changing any one of these alone fix healthcare in the US? Maybe the first 2, if given a long time to materialize. But do any of these people deserve to die? It says a lot about you if you automatically dehumanize these people and say yes.
> Things really feel like a melting pot at the moment, with so much pent up anger amongst people who actually lead pretty decent lives.
One of the reasons that many people voted for Trump, is nihilism. The real belief that Trump is the one most likely to burn the ‘system’ to the ground. That is the brightest hope some voters have.
Please put more effort into understanding people's issues with the system as it stands today.
And please understand that virtually no one wants to leave a burned-out wreckage on a desolate hellscape. Everyone fancies themselves Shiva, or a phoenix, or whatever cultural imagery makes sense to you.
Given the number of people who think that Oswald did not shoot three people, that James Earl Ray did not shoot anyone, that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot anyone, the mental gymnastics are not surprising. It's always been like this; the internet just allows us to know about it in real time. There are still people to this day who will tell you that the Yippies really DID levitate the Pentagon.
Imagine modern Russia. You can't have much of an opinion on pressing subjects of today unless that opinion is sanctioned by Russia's authorities - otherwise you're dead, or incarcerated or at best left the country. The propaganda machine is working 24/7. Now, Russia is a young country - counting from the last big turmoil in 1991, it's only 30+ years old - but some of the people there lived through USSR times. And some 100- years ago USSR was going through grim times itself, with millions suffering in purges, and even more millions and tens of millions learning to conform. And, as some prized artists and writers said there, the country killed a lot of progressive and inspired and very many of who're left are those who did purges, participated in them or from their families. So now the Russia's population - many involuntarily - support the war which was started for, frankly, really wrong reasons. And the future the Russia is perhaps looking towards is grim, hard and thankless no matter how things will progress. Can you imagine the scale of the task of getting back from the proverbial pit towards what we'd see as a more normal way of a country, what's going on in the heads of those people trying to live a normal life there?
Now, you might be surprised but America also has problems under the surface. America likes to project the good impression, but certain problems exist, aren't addressed enough for some time, got accumulated and it's harder to gloss them over. And since those problems are decades old, you have some parts of generations quite familiar with them. And we have Trump - first winning in 2016 and then even more triumphantly winning in 2024 - and those "normal", "good" sort of decidedly lost this November to those who's combined message might well be "things aren't well". Maybe we need to look at what's normal, as in if we have that state? Should we consider normal something only 40% think? 50%? 70%? That is, if 30% have long running reasons to think things aren't normal - is it enough for you to pause?
To the melting pot. What would you think if, looking into the pot, at the extreme you'd see the whole pot is full of that pent up anger, and nothing - or almost nothing - of what's "normal" here? Do numbers matter here? And, if they are suddenly too large, what you're going to do with lots and lots of those who'd think, figuratively, that lynching is still a good idea? Or in other somewhat known words, what would you do the good from, if the only thing you can do that is from evil?
[1] has some actual numbers to answer that question, with e.g. [2] for modern US numbers (since [1] has only Europe). The wealth gap peaked in 1910, took a nose dive until the late 1960s (though much more pronounced in Europe than in the US) and is on the rise since then.
The post-industrial US dipped as low as ~1300 or ~1650 Europe, but is now back to levels Europe only reached in 1750, well on track to repeating the rising inequality during industrialization. Sweden is still at 1280/1600 Europe numbers, better than 1960s USA.
Actually it probably has risen a bit more since then since those are 2010 numbers, hence the comparison of US numbers to the French Revolution
Wouldn't the opposite be expected, an aristocratic caste system less equal than an ostensibly democratic society ostensibly based on fairness and human rights?
If you think the system is designed to do anything but transfer wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest, then you should seriously do some critical thinking on the subject.
How does a rich person existing affect me? Is it just because I'm jealous that I don't have a yacht and so I should try to overthrow the system that doesn't let me have a yacht? Even though I'll never get a yacht in any system?
Can we look at the graph of wealth disparity of America versus other nations?
Extremely rich people control every aspect of your life, how your city is planned, the state of the job market, the state of the economy, the laws, the state of the planet itself. One way that got a lot of attention lately is that extremely rich people prevent access to health care for everyone else.
Because the existence of these people means that we concentrate economic resources toward building yachts that might otherwise be concentrated toward growing food or building homes.
Rational economic actors who produce goods and/or services will tend to supply what there is the most economic demand for (what brings them the most profit). If half the population has almost none of the money, then their needs have little economic demand behind them. So then what is the economic incentive to supply them with the things they need?
In other words, producing a hundred-million-dollar yacht is a hundred million dollars (less profit margin) that could have been invested toward a more collective good, thus increasing the supply of those goods, thus reducing their scarcity, thus reducing their price.
> Before accounting for taxes and transfers, the U.S. ranked 10th in income inequality; among the countries with more unequal income distributions were France, the U.K. and Ireland. But after taking taxes and transfers into account, the U.S. had the second-highest level of inequality, behind only Chile. (Mexico and Brazil had higher after-tax/transfer Gini scores, but no “before” scores with which to compare them; including them would push the U.S. down to fourth place.)
Because of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States, money is speech. Therefore the more money you have, the more speech you have, and the more speech you have the more loudly your voice is heard. The more money you have, the more political influence you have. Because of the Citizens United decision, the politicians are no longer beholden to the will of the voters, but to the will of the donors. The Supreme Court is not supposed to make law, that is the providence of the Congress, but here they made law. Money is speech and corporations are people. If you can't match their donations, you shut sit down and shut the fuck up because you do not count anymore with your pithy vote an no money to donate.
He gave the Unabomber’s manifesto four stars on Goodreads, and described Unabomber as a "political revolutionary".
Excerpts from his review:
"It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out."
"He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary."
For anyone reading stuff like this, read Ellul’s Technological Society instead. Optionally followed by “The Meaning of the City.” I haven’t read the manifesto and don’t plan to; it apparently cited Ellul a fair amount and Ellul seems like a saner guide.
Actually, David Skrbina's "The Metaphysics of Technology" is the most easily readable, comprehensive cover of critical philosophical views towards technology from the ancient greeks until modern time.
Ted K made virtually no reference to Ellul in his manifesto either. In either case, both were quite sane. Ted's manifesto is not a philosophical analysis of technology like Ellul or Skrbina. Ted's manifesto is a practical treatise agains technology and its primary thesis is that technological society must be destroyed.
Why not both? Ted Kaczynski was an important thinker whether or not you agree with his thesis and methods. ISAIF was published in newspapers and the sky didn't fall.
I don't see the point. The Unabomber manifesto had nothing to do with bombs. It is a commentary on the state of technology in society and a commentary on leftism.
You can't say it had nothing to do with them. At a minimum, the manifesto directly motivated them.
Im not a Kaczynski scholar, so maybe it is possible to embrace the philosophy and come to sperate conclusions, but that is rarely the case for manifestos. They usually make strong positive claims about the necessity and justification of the author's actions.
My takeaway from this is that what would have saved this man is a proper liberal arts degree. I can't deny that there are reasons for engineering degrees being as focused as they are, but he clearly didn't get the chance to work out his philosophical ideas in an appropriately challenging environment.
My takeaway is that an engineering degree doesn't have anything to do with a guy that, from that message, looks to me as an arrogant narcissist (by how smart he tries to be) who likely doesn't have trained too well his acceptance for frustration and who seems to give in his impulses disregarding anything else.
And your takeaway is, for me, infantile, naive and dangerous. This guys is not a victim of a system, this guy is a killer, whether we like that CEO or not.
The Unabomber's MO was politically-motivated terror attacks aimed at high-rank targets. That's exactly what the NYC killing was, so it supports the claim that this guy did it.
Jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a Not Guilty verdict even though jurors believe beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant has broken the law. Because the Not Guilty verdict cannot be overturned, and because the jurors cannot be punished for their verdict, the law is said to be nullified in that particular case.
The basic premise, as I understand it, is that there is nothing illegal about coming to the wrong conclusion as a juror. I have also read that it can be contempt of court to try to convince jurors to intentionally come to a conclusion not based on the law and evidence.
So what would happen if a single juror just remained steadfast that the defendant was innocent despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Can a judge remove that juror if they believe they are not being forthright?
Whenever people justify why the US's jury system is better than the judgement by judges that's prevalent in continental Europe it's always about these exact scenarios. If you just want to find facts you don't need a jury of peers. The jury is at least in part there to pass a moral judgement beyond the letter of the law.
From what I understand a juror can only be removed during the jury selection process or if someone outside the jury "tampers" with the jurors. If you get called to jury duty, the quickest way to get out of it is to say you know about jury nullification. But if you don't reveal that and get into the jury you are free to rule as you want and to try to convince the other jurors to do the same.
Trying to nullify with a Michael Scott-style "I DECLARE NULLIFICATIOOOON!" or otherwise mentioning it is probably a bad idea. I suppose if you'll get warned and you do it again you'll be held in contempt. But I'm no expert.
The situation you describe is known as a hung jury, and would result in a mistrial. Usually this means the case is retried later (with a different jury).
When the jurors can't agree, for whatever reason, you get a hung jury.
A judge needs cause to remove a juror. This includes a juror refusing to deliberate. In the specific case you bring up, it would be hard to prove that the juror is refusing to deliberate (i.e. "not being forthright") compared to just differently interpreting the facts of the case or the law or disagreeing with how the law should be applied.
It is the purpose of voir dire to weed out jurors with a preexisting bias in the case. You don't want to remove jurors after the case has started, as you run the risk of running out of alternates (there are probably state specific laws on how to handle this without requiring a mistrial though).
> The basic premise, as I understand it, is that there is nothing illegal about coming to the wrong conclusion as a juror
Note that this works regardless of which direction the wrong conclusion is in.
People always talk about it in the case of a juror voting to acquit someone when the evidence is that they are guilty but juror choose to disregard it, but historically it often went the other way. There's a long history of black people in the US, especially in the South, being convicted by all white juries that almost certainly would not have convicted on the exact same evidence if the accused has been white.
I don't know if there is a name for this, so I'll call it reverse-nullification, with nullification just referring to the case of acquittal of someone despite the evidence.
Unlike a nullification case, an reverse-nullification case is in theory correctable. A nullification case is not correctable because an acquittal by a jury cannot be reversed by the judge or an appeals court. A judge or appeals court can reverse a conviction so could correct an reverse-nullification case.
However, as a practical matter that often cannot actually be done because often the judge or appeals court cannot tell that it was an reverse-nullification case. A case often comes down to conflicting stories from witnesses with the jury having to decide which witnesses to believe. The conviction may have been an reverse-nullification or it might just have been that the jury found the prosecution witnesses more believable.
Murder is only justified when it's your business model and behind numbers and profit margins in an Excel sheet are the real people you are sentencing to a lifetime of suffering and/or death.
A quick look at United Health's P/L shows a 6% profit margin. This does not quite support the popular rhetoric of a corporation in search of relentless margin (unless the argument is they are bad at it despite all efforts).
Very interesting, the insurance with the highest rejection rate where the medical spendings are twice the cost per capita compared to European average and the median age is younger, the insurance makes only %6?
What do you do so wrong? What is your mechanism of getting rid of those who provide you the healthcare at low efficiency and hight cost? In Europe we have elections and when those don't yield the desired results we storm the HQ and replace by force.
You can't be expecting that when too many people die the insurance company will lose customers and the shareholders will replace the top management, right?
Aren't health insurance company margins capped? i.e. if they are required to spend 80% on medical care so effectively they can only make more money be bloating costs more and more.
It's better to waste $4.75 by maximizing the inefficiency and costs of the entire system thorough extremely overpriced drugs due to various nonsensical middlemen based market structures, administrative bloat etc. and make 0.25$ than to reduce premiums. Of course it still costs $5 to the society. It might actually be better if they had higher margins...
... or that they have used creative accounting to come to that number.
Regardless, people who are debilitated by injury or illness aren't going to look at 6% and say, "well, jeeze, I guess these guys really are hard done by."
They're going to wonder why something that costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year (health insurance premiums) isn't paying for a medically-necessary procedure, profits be damned.
That's the scary part. It's very tempting to just sentence someone like this. But more you dwell on it, the worst it gets. There is a reason why death penalty is considered an extreme.
The entire argument for high CEO renumeration is that they take on total responsibility for all actions of the company. The buck stops with them. So, why do we think it's acceptable for that not to be the case when the company does something bad?
We don't need to know this exact number to know that American patients are getting uniquely fucked by their healthcare system compared to every other developed nation. Once we're on-par with what other countries achieve, then we can have the philosophical debate.
This is a purposefully disingenuous hypothetical. There are people who have real shots at a better life, or continuing their life for that matter, who get denied the insurance they pay for! It isn't only people who are already on death's door.
To your point, there is a concept called "social murder" [1]:
> When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
We can compare this to, say, all the people involved in the death camps in Nazi Germany. Who exactly is culpable for murder? Ther person dropping the Zyklon B? Or were they just following orders? The camp commandant who gave the orders? Or were they just following orders? What about the camp guards? What about the train operators? Those who maintained the trains? Those who built and maintained the camps? Those who loaded the trains? Those who detained Jews and other "undesirables"?
In the case of death-by-denail of health coverage, there are many hands involved (hence "social murder"). Personally, I don't blame the people who man the phones, for example. They are coerced into a job. But someone is responsible and you can make a reasonable claim that the CEO fits that bill. Where you draw the line between those two is another question. There are no doubt people working at United whose job it is to come up with creative ways of denying claims. Their bonuses are probably tied to it. You can make a reasonable case that they're aware of the consequences of their action. Are they culpable too?
Additionallly, people tend to view violence as violence or not depending on who does it. Like tossing tear gas cannisters at protestors is not violence but throwing the cannister back is [2].
UHC has one of the highest rates of claim denials. Sure, there are some people getting the support they need but there are a lot of people who are not. What justification is there for that? The only justification is "profit", and that is not something that should ever be involved in healthcare.
Ahaha, yeah, right? It's just ridiculous. What a laughable debate, this whole insurance thing is. It's just the free market working to optimize outcomes.
By the way, can you help me understand what a 'pre-existing condition' is?
Literally nobody outside of America has experience with this term.
At the very least, it's the charge of the insurance company to serve the customer in a way that passes on savings to the customer in the form of lower premiums or increased amounts of care.
It's insulting to a person's intelligence to tell them "we just don't have the money to cover the surgery recommended by doctors to solve your debilitating injury or illness" and then turn around and give your c-suite seven-figure compensation packages every year while also instituting a dividend for the free riders known as shareholders.
In an ideal world the insurance company would operate more like a fiduciary than a custodian. Their job should be to guide you towards the best possible outcome not just the outcome that suits their best interest. But, that would require everyone along the chain from physicians, pharmacies, nurses, back office, front office, billing and scheduling to all operate in that same manner -- which unfortunately doesn't lead to profit so we end up with the system we have.
Given insurance companies are not a necessary component of a functioning healthcare system why do we normalize debates around what level of resource extraction constitutes murder on their part?
The principle carries in so far as you hold up your contract for covered claims until bankrupt.
Or to use an analogy, which HN absolutely hates and will nitpick since an analogy is never the same thing: you do not get to trespass someone from your airplane while you are in flight. If the airplane catastrophically fails and someone is sucked out, then there is a pass.
It does not appear these denied claims are just people getting sucked out of a catastrophically failed aircraft.
Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. It’s a standard monetary dispute, and we have a due process for these. If you think that so many claims are being unreasonably denied, why not start a company offering bridge loans, and funding legal challenges?
Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
It’s not a standard monetary dispute - one party is under duress and holding a potential time bomb that the other party needs to defuse, but is arguing over.
The mess is deeper, but starting an insurance company is not easy either, one could blame the regulations. And then one cannot blame regulations either, it's the regulators/govt who are ultimately voted/allowed by the people. It's a case where every one passes the buck, and so no one single entity is responsible for the mess.
> Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. It’s a standard monetary dispute, and we have a due process for these.
> Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
You do realize that these companies lobby to make sure that it stays inefficient, right?
In the cases where they don't use the court system, they use arbitration, which is usually tilted in the favor of insurance companies.
If you want a fair shake at getting the benefits you paid for, you have to go through the courts. Given the nature of the subject of the lawsuit, there's a real chance that you'll be dead or bankrupt before you get your day in court. That's not a system that works. And when there are systems that don't work, there are on occasion people who will go outside the system to make their own. There is no scenario in which vigilantism is completely eliminated when you have people making massive sums of money off of refusing to do business in good faith.
More people need to read the cautionary tale of Ken Rex McElroy and the town of Skidmore, MO.
> Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder.
This is crazy. Maybe it's not "murder" in the traditional sense but you are making a choice on whether someone gets life-saving care, or lives in immense pain for the rest of their lives until they commit suicide. Again, this kind of normalized violence is justified when it's a business making choices to increase profits. We are so disconnected from our humanity that rounding errors in an Excel sheet mean actual lives are being ended, but that's okay.
Keeping a lot of the incriminating evidence on him (including, it seems, the jacket) can't be a careless mistake (in my opinion). So what are some of the possible reasons?
- He committed the crime and had another target in mind
- He committed the crime and really didn't think he'd get away with it so he kept it to keep some unknown options open.
- He committed the crime and didn't want any doubt that he was guilty when he got caught. Perhaps he wanted the media to be focussed more on the "why" than "is it him?" speculation.
How about some of the possible reasons he was at a McDonalds instead of many other ways to get food that wouldn't have security cameras
- He was ready to be caught as the media cycle was moving on and he perceived momentum of empathy for him right now
- He was ready to be caught because being on the run was too hard and not inline with his goals
- He wasn't thinking clearly and didn't really have much of a post-shooting plan outside of getting out of NYC
Getting in and out of NYC leaving as little as he did was the challenge. Getting across the border or camping out in the Forrest for a few weeks shouldn’t be that much of a challenge in comparison.
Plenty of smart and clever people make mistakes all of the time and you’re only oppressing yourself if you think otherwise. For fear of making mistakes is foolish pride.
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevski) illustrates this. It's probably wasn't a conscious process or well thought out plan, and it's difficult to imagine and prepare for the pressures of a life-and-death situation in advance.
Any sane person would discard the evidence by scattering it. Any homeless will take anyone of the items.
He was smart enough to carry away the feat without getting caught. He is not smart socially, his demise doesn't serve his purpose. Sounds like fit to be an engineer. And kind of suicidal.
Most likely he realized once the authorities have his name - he can't run forever.
That being said - some obvious stuff he could have done like grow a beard and shave it after and fly out of the country to somewhere cheap like Thailand with $10k
Just 2 days ago, the police reported they found his backpack with jacket inside and a veterinary gun nearby... now he had the same jacket, backpack and another unlicenced gun with him. His eyebrows and nose are different, can clearly see it from the few released pictures.
It's surprising how many people are missing this crucial step.
CCTV footage shows a guy with certain features.
Days later, after no leads whatsoever, another photo shows a guy with markedly different features.
Now authorities say they have caught a guy matching the second footage. He conveniently walked into a McDonalds with his manifesto, fake ID, and a 3d printed gun. ???
Idk man, could be legit I guess... But it is a bit wild that so many people are taking all this at face value, unquestioned; as if there isn't tremendous pressure on authorities to deliver a neatly packaged conclusion to the story at almost any cost.
Readit News
- person clearly had meticulously planned the execution of the hit and exfiltration. Even leaving red herrings on his way out of the city (backpack full of Monopoly money). Yet clumsily keeps _all_ of the evidence that would implicate himself in this murder. Not to mention he is wandering about in public while a multi-state manhunt is underway with the full weight of alphabet soup agencies, and state and local LEOs? To me, this suggests it was part of his plan to get caught. There was no escape to a non-extradition country. The “shaking” mentioned while talking with police could just be a massive surge of adrenaline as he sees his plan unfold before his eyes. Then use the live streamed and televised court to spread his message. Then live out the rest of his life as a political figure as the media continue to analyze this persons life and motivations. Just like Ted.
- Or the internet, media really over-estimated this persons competence. It was really just dumb luck that he even escaped NYC. At that point, he was just improvising after leaving NYC. His arrogance to keep the evidence as some sick mementos or trophies ultimately did him in. Likely try to plead insanity with the manifesto. Probably fail to do so, then eventually get convicted on all charges and end up in a supermax penitentiary for life.
I'll confirm it for you right now. For me it's not just the back, it's areas along the entire spine. I've had spinal cord compression on my thoracic spine since late 2017 and nobody will touch it. My lumbar spine has many herniations and "schmorl's nodes" (where it's chipping away at the actual vertebrae) in addition to clamping my nerve roots shut. I had emergency surgery in my neck in early 2018. Prior to the thoracic spine injury, I was in the best shape of my life; very muscular and healthy with a 6-pack like you see in Luigi's pictures.
It's been an absolute miserable experience for the last 8 years. Being gaslighted by doctors before and after my surgery didn't help. Insurance tried to deny my emergency surgery at first despite the fact I lost all sensation from the neck down almost overnight. When you're dealing with trauma and the system works against you, very dark thoughts start to form. I'm not going to say I condone what Luigi did, but if you think people go through these events and don't think those thoughts on many occasions, you're so very wrong. There's a HUGE range of emotions that comes with it all. Suicide was definitely one of them for a long time as well. I have a wife and kids though and do not wish to burden them further by adding to the list of problems. They're the only things that's kept me going strong this whole time.
I haven’t gotten all the details, but something like this makes sense. It was a personal vendetta from a person out of desperation/frustration.
I guess as more details come out we will know
Ever since he got "caught" (if you can call someone literally telling the police where he is "the police catching him"), all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" (i.e. attempting to demonstrate that a bullet was not only fired from a given type of gun but a specific singular gun of that type) and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him. They might actually be lucky and produce matches in this case as they have the actual suspect and murder weapon (assuming this wasn't an extremely unlikely 5D chess move of using a body double fall guy and/or different gun) but both of these types of evidence are extremely unreliable and rarely help actually finding the suspect even if they make for good television when they work. As I understand it the police even walked back on the mayor's initial claim about "having a name" to "having a list of names" - not to mention that you don't call in the FBI when you already have good leads yourself (if only for optics/political reasons).
He seems to have been mentally unstable for a while before engaging in this killing and the fact he wrote a manifesto strongly suggests he had an intention of being caught or at least considered it highly likely. The monopoly money bag wasn't necessarily a "red herring" as everyone I heard talk about it interpreted it as intending to send a message, which seems to agree with the apparent contents of his manifesto (based on what news reports have cited from it). The water bottle the police now wants to use for DNA evidence may have been deliberately left there for this purpose, too.
Based on what I've heard of his manifesto, he may have intended to kill other people too but have realized the difficulty involved given that his very public first killing likely spooked the other people on his list. I think it's more likely he didn't fully plan out an entire sequence of killings or didn't account for these complications and essentially gave up, settling on being caught sooner rather than later. People generally don't write manifestos when they don't also want to take credit for their actions.
Conference probably had a hotel block they were booking and a link to book so you know which hotel to camp.
Not rocket science at all, just basic OSint
Waiting 15min instead of 1hr 15min was probably luck though.
I’d feel more confident if he’d staked the route out for multiple days or if there was a plausible backup plan like breaking in to the CEO’s hotel or the conference.
Because someone paid that much money stays at a fancier place, like one of the Conrads or Waldorf Astorias. Hilton's a mid-level brand.
Or, you follow him from the conference center the day before.
But they may well have arranged other, small meetings with people also attending the same annual meeting. It's then convenient to have them all in the same hotel.
It is a bit of psychological blindness where we convince ourselves that random murders aren't as easy as they really are. The truth is that almost anyone -- including people with lots of security theater -- can be nullified by random people. This is quadruply true in the era of drones.
Most normal people just have a healthy self preservation instinct, so aren't willing to accept those consequences.
definitely this one. there was a lot of projection of competency onto him, wanting him to be some kind of superhero assassin that would disappear. when in reality, he wasn't using that welrod pistol clone, and his gun was jamming with every shot.
but also he was self-destructive and definitely wasn't trying hard enough to not get caught. and that comes with the territory because you're not going to be well-adjusted and decide to assassinate someone in broad daylight. and i would pick self-destructive over arrogant. and he may just have not realized how distinct his facial features were.
Now he gets caught with all the incriminating evidence you could ask for? I'd say Occam's Razor points to your second theory: He's not playing some sort of 4D chess. He just decided to go kill this guy for some reason and went and did it. Dumb luck and a dense population easily explains how he was able to escape the city.
But maybe he knew it was inevitable so he spent his last few days living life normally.
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Reportedly he is smart, so he probably knows the value of a good mystery.
Why would he do all that if he wanted to get caught?
This. And HN is the perfect example to observe this phenomenon.
I lost track how many highly confident but incorrect takes I read here on semiconductor topics from people who assumed they know everything about any tech topic because they earn sich figures from writing crud web software.
Thinking he’s smarter than the rest of us is most likely a big part of his identity.
I have seen this happen people do this with programming / CAD / 3D modeling / various crafts etc.
You see this all the time where people on HN, Reddit, wherever, will act as though roughing in the plumbing and electrical for a home addition is comparable in complexity and fraught with similar nuances as doing all the process electrical and plumbing for an industrial facility when it very much not.
I’m curious about what exactly prompted whoever called him in to become suspicious - was the profile released from photos good enough? Or was he acting suspiciously with his backpack?
Even if you try to destroy the evidence, evidence of you destroying the evidence works just as well for a lot of cases.
- The intelligent individual is also self-absorbed and believed that they would be able to continue to kill CEOs without getting caught. A narcissistic streak that allowed them to make no attempt at concealing their identity in public. They kept the weapon in order to move to a new target (or they 3D printed an identical if the reports of a 3D printed gun are correct). They believed they would either not get caught or that the public would not turn them in. They may have envisioned themselves the Ted of Healthcare.
At some point you know you’ve already been caught.
Where he will finally get decent health care for free.
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Let's say he shuts up and gets a lawyer. His lawyer can say that maybe the real gunman noticed he looked similar, then switched bags on a bus. It's weak, but it's something.
If he tossed it in NYC, he leaves possible DNA at the scene. If he tosses it at home, the cops will likely find it and take his disposal as an admission of guilt.
IANAL but while I guess it's not good to have your lawyer run the Shaggy defence ("it wasn't me!") if the police have made an effort in the investigation then there's a surprising chance they'll find the evidence anyway.
At the very least that could be his rationale.
He didn't know if they had a van watching his house, and if his bins were being collected by the police. He might have been too scared and paranoid to do anything.
I talked to someone personally who at some point had committed a series of crimes, and at some point they started doing things that were more and more likely to get them caught; they told me they thought to themselves, "What am I doing?" But they didn't stop, and eventually got caught.
In a different story, a few years ago I dropped my wallet on the sidewalk outside my house, and someone picked it up and tried to use one of the credit cards in it. Then they got in a fight which got them arrested; and the police found my wallet (with my ID and everything) in their possession. Why get in a fight that's going to get you arrested just at the moment when you have stolen property in your pocket?
My take is this: We present to others, and even ourselves, the illusion that there's just one unified "self"; but really inside there are a number of independent motivations within us. In both cases above, I think there was a part of those people who felt guilty and actually did want to be caught and punished.
It's possible there was something similar going on with the guy who shot the CEO: one part of him had managed to plan everything perfectly so that he could get away; but there was a saboteur. It couldn't ahead of time prevent him from doing the shooting, but it could afterwards prevent him from disposing of the evidence and ensure that he got caught.
I have a different take. Assuming his crime is driven by his beliefs/mission, not being found will not further it. Logically you may argue that it would afford him more chances to carry on but given that we assume him to be driven by strong and passionate belief, he would want to be clearly and explicitly recognized for those beliefs and would want those thoughts to take center stage of public opinion. Carrying evidence also is his way of broadcasting the signal that he doesn't care about getting caught since he did the right thing and has nothing to be ashamed of.
I know I am not doing my body and health a favor. There's a tool called journaling, but I am not even using it right now. It's a very useful tool to get your mind into thinking "wait, this doesn't make sense", or "why am I behaving this way?"
Everyday, I say to myself that I am speeding up my decline in health, and yet nothing changes(because I don't journal).
Eric Berne in one of the pop psy books makes a claim which to me rings true -- that the real criminals don't get caught, the ones that get caught are the ones that want to play hide & seek as a trauma response from childhood -- there's a very deep drive to be sought after and found and those people, because of absent parents and lack of attention didn't get to play it out, so they really do want to be discovered in their sub-conscious mind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CiVFn1vEIiM
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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.
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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.
Why you'd eat-in at a fast food place rather than just go via some low level Chinese takeaway though!
Exactly. A gun, even without ammo, still allows you to get out of hairy situations: steal a car, force someone to drive you somewhere, etc
>Why you'd eat-in at a fast food place rather than just go via some low level Chinese takeaway though!
Maybe he though he'd be more anonymous in a major fast food chain, and you stand out more in a Chinese place.
That's not this guy.
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Wife is a GP doctor, maybe 1/3rd of her patients have some form of this.
2. This guy has a terminal illness.
3. This guy is bankrupt after healthcare debt + buying backpacks.
I've stayed at that place multiple times, though years ago.
They did check ID, but never copied it.
I wonder how they knew it was fake.
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.
I assumed he had some help with the timing via the burner phone
But this all looks very lone wolfish now
If real, he scheduled a post to be released everyday at ~6pm EST. If he wasn't caught that day he would delete the scheduled post, and reschedule for the next day at 6pm.
I say 6 because it was the earliest snapshot of the site. Looks like the post just got taken down off sub stack and I can't view the exact time of post.
That's likely how it happened
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.)
Trial for this could be hugely publicized
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I try not to overreact to stuff online, but this took me a bit by surprise. Things really feel like a melting pot at the moment, with so much pent up anger amongst people who actually lead pretty decent lives.
It's because the whole image is fake. In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, and the power of an institution to decide about someone else's life or death is just one aspect of it; prices inflated beyond imagination is another one (these two are related). So we pretend to live normal lives but in the back of our head we pray we don't ever need to become a victim of this system. But on the outside yes, it looks like everything is fine and we have decent lives.
Be it a privately run for profit insurance system that runs on perverse incentives, or a government agency that runs on power and influence and corruption.
I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good.
My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance.
However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore.
The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved.
After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back.
Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids.
The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked.
She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed.
BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later.
You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........
I get that system needs to push folks into working hard and motivate exceptional efforts (and luck), but sometimes this goes into properly bad directions where few gain and majority loses. In any functional society, all this is never isolated and it has ripple effects.
No merely healthcare, but employment, housing etc. It's easy to single out healthcare for obvious reasons.
Kill one person by putting lead in their heart at high speed and now it’s a serious crime. If the victim is Important then you get a massive manhunt and national news coverage.
Flint, Michigan
I wish this was an attempt at a joke.
That is a sign that people believe they can't obtain redress through widely available legal means.
If the state, courts and other systems don't get people justice or something you can squint at and call justice when they are wronged some fraction of those wronged will go outside the systems and seek to get even instead.
Public sympathy for the (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what gives the parts of the institutions that want to do what the people want the political capital to something other than the status quo.
I, and probably a lot of people reading this on HN, are outwardly very comfortable.
I have cash/assets that would be life changing for most people (especially when I read comments on reddit where people say that $10k would be life changing for them) - and a "good" white-collar job.
I'm also lucky enough to be old enough to have not been 100% screwed like our even younger generation has (I only got 90% screwed).
I've been very lucky in life, but when I see the level of wealth inequality and how corporations have completely captured our government, and our two-tiered justice system, it makes me feel sick and angry.
I still feel like I'm being held hostage by the 0.1%, under pressure to keep working to line other's pockets for much longer than I would otherwise have to, and like the whole thing could all come crashing down in a week's time given some improbable but far-from-impossible set of circumstances.
I also don't feel like I would be supported by my government, corporations, or society in general if those circumstances actually occurred.
So I definitely sympathize with the frustration of people who feel unsupported by society and unrepresented by government - especially those who happened to be unluckier in life than I.
And with the current state of affairs, there must be a LOT of them around.
I sympathize with that frustration a hell of a lot more than I sympathize for a dead CEO who made a career out of systematically denying treatment to people who paid him for coverage.
In fact, I'm happy he died as a reminder that nobody is untouchable, no matter how much lobbying your corporation has done to make social murder legal, and no matter how much you've tried to isolate yourself from the consequences of your terrible actions.
I read a reddit comment about the alleged shooter's arrest before:
"murder is such a strong word, can't we just call it removing a cancer?"
Side note - the "internet" is very likely a mix of bots and real humans nowadays. What might seem initially like a real person saying "hunt the snitch down" could very likely be a bot that is meant to sow and influence discord. That bot's followers could very likely be real people who then say "ya i agree with this account! get your pitchfork!"
So it's not so much that there are no real people who want to hunt down the snitch, but that there's a very loud minority of performative extremists with an army of sock puppet accounts who want to hunt down the snitch.
And one reason it's pent-up, as opposed to released, is due to corporations taking over our society and ruining human lives. All within the confines of the law and democracy. That's what this is about. There is no recourse or effective vehicle to be heard.
This is the part of the story that must be discussed more, lest there will be more killings like this one.
I take it as a reaction to the wider public feeling that the US medical system is broken and the appropriate channel to fix it (voting & politics) being broken too thanks to lobbying.
Under circumstances like this people’s perception shifts to a more relativistic perspective. A bit like perception of a rioter throwing a stone at riot police depends on whether the viewer agrees with the movements goals even if in isolation they wouldn’t normally approve of throwing rocks at people faces.
Basically, we’ve begun normalizing events that fit a timeline of domestic turmoil.
It's a real reminder of how little sympathy people can have about people who they consider the enemy or the "other". I'm almost certain nearly all of the people celebrating the murder believe that they're good people and believe in justice too. Humans are so flawed. And I'm not suggesting for a moment I'm above it. I've often noticed how I don't care as much as I should when someone I dislike is harmed or suffers injustice.
It’s not that there. Is a lack of sympathy, it’s overwhelmed by the feeling of justice. And not the injustice you think occurred.
It's because they believe in justice that they are celebrating the murder.
I (obviously) don’t support vigilante justice, and felt somewhat sad when Hussein and Gadaffi were hanged/lynched because despite their evil, I’d rather we don’t treat human beings like that.
But I don’t think it’s hyperbole to consider the actions of this CEO and his company in the same breath as such evil tyrants; and as such, I can understand why many might be happy about what took place, especially if they had personal animus with the company.
It makes for a good story. We’ve all seen that movie 100 times.
I wonder if the shooter will survive long enough to make it to jury trial. That’s when the real circus will begin.
(All I know about this story is that United Health has one of the highest incorrect claim rejection rates in the industry. I know nothing about the CEO, but we’re way past 140 characters at this point, so these things don’t matter to social media.)
Did you mean tipping point?
What is the euphemism I'm actually looking for? Knife edge? No.
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https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371412
It's everywhere. You're simply wrong. Sort by date, sort by score, look on any broader news story and check out the comments. They're not "extreme", either. Even if their content was, which it isn't, it still wouldn't be extreme by definition at this point.
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The problems with US healthcare boil down to there being more demand for healthcare than supply, and a fat bureaucracy sprouting up to partition that limited healthcare, often screwing over people who need exceptionally special care or who can't afford insurance in the first place. Who is to blame? You could reasonably apply some blame to the shortage of doctors created by the AMA, the FDA's guidance and the sugar industry's lobbying resulting in people being less healthy, lack of consumer protection laws around opaque medical pricing/gouging, and private insurance.
Would changing any one of these alone fix healthcare in the US? Maybe the first 2, if given a long time to materialize. But do any of these people deserve to die? It says a lot about you if you automatically dehumanize these people and say yes.
One of the reasons that many people voted for Trump, is nihilism. The real belief that Trump is the one most likely to burn the ‘system’ to the ground. That is the brightest hope some voters have.
And please understand that virtually no one wants to leave a burned-out wreckage on a desolate hellscape. Everyone fancies themselves Shiva, or a phoenix, or whatever cultural imagery makes sense to you.
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Now, you might be surprised but America also has problems under the surface. America likes to project the good impression, but certain problems exist, aren't addressed enough for some time, got accumulated and it's harder to gloss them over. And since those problems are decades old, you have some parts of generations quite familiar with them. And we have Trump - first winning in 2016 and then even more triumphantly winning in 2024 - and those "normal", "good" sort of decidedly lost this November to those who's combined message might well be "things aren't well". Maybe we need to look at what's normal, as in if we have that state? Should we consider normal something only 40% think? 50%? 70%? That is, if 30% have long running reasons to think things aren't normal - is it enough for you to pause?
To the melting pot. What would you think if, looking into the pot, at the extreme you'd see the whole pot is full of that pent up anger, and nothing - or almost nothing - of what's "normal" here? Do numbers matter here? And, if they are suddenly too large, what you're going to do with lots and lots of those who'd think, figuratively, that lynching is still a good idea? Or in other somewhat known words, what would you do the good from, if the only thing you can do that is from evil?
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The post-industrial US dipped as low as ~1300 or ~1650 Europe, but is now back to levels Europe only reached in 1750, well on track to repeating the rising inequality during industrialization. Sweden is still at 1280/1600 Europe numbers, better than 1960s USA.
Actually it probably has risen a bit more since then since those are 2010 numbers, hence the comparison of US numbers to the French Revolution
1: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/top-rich-europe-long-run-hist...
2: https://www.blogscapitalbolsa.com/media/images/69b536a604624...
Technically not in socialist soviet union for example. (But de facto the top party members did control way more wealth than common people.)
Can we look at the graph of wealth disparity of America versus other nations?
Rational economic actors who produce goods and/or services will tend to supply what there is the most economic demand for (what brings them the most profit). If half the population has almost none of the money, then their needs have little economic demand behind them. So then what is the economic incentive to supply them with the things they need?
In other words, producing a hundred-million-dollar yacht is a hundred million dollars (less profit margin) that could have been invested toward a more collective good, thus increasing the supply of those goods, thus reducing their scarcity, thus reducing their price.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/12/19/global-in...
Most of those countries aren't exactly paragons of political stability, but they're probably not going to undergo a french revolution any time soon.
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Excerpts from his review:
"It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out."
"He was a violent individual - rightfully imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/luigi-mang...
People see what they want to I suppose.
Ted K made virtually no reference to Ellul in his manifesto either. In either case, both were quite sane. Ted's manifesto is not a philosophical analysis of technology like Ellul or Skrbina. Ted's manifesto is a practical treatise agains technology and its primary thesis is that technological society must be destroyed.
A book with similar sentiment that is more approachable is Neil Postman’s Technopoly.
I think it has been long enough to say that the bombings were not productive.
Im not a Kaczynski scholar, so maybe it is possible to embrace the philosophy and come to sperate conclusions, but that is rarely the case for manifestos. They usually make strong positive claims about the necessity and justification of the author's actions.
And your takeaway is, for me, infantile, naive and dangerous. This guys is not a victim of a system, this guy is a killer, whether we like that CEO or not.
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So what would happen if a single juror just remained steadfast that the defendant was innocent despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Can a judge remove that juror if they believe they are not being forthright?
From what I understand a juror can only be removed during the jury selection process or if someone outside the jury "tampers" with the jurors. If you get called to jury duty, the quickest way to get out of it is to say you know about jury nullification. But if you don't reveal that and get into the jury you are free to rule as you want and to try to convince the other jurors to do the same.
The situation you describe is known as a hung jury, and would result in a mistrial. Usually this means the case is retried later (with a different jury).
A judge needs cause to remove a juror. This includes a juror refusing to deliberate. In the specific case you bring up, it would be hard to prove that the juror is refusing to deliberate (i.e. "not being forthright") compared to just differently interpreting the facts of the case or the law or disagreeing with how the law should be applied.
It is the purpose of voir dire to weed out jurors with a preexisting bias in the case. You don't want to remove jurors after the case has started, as you run the risk of running out of alternates (there are probably state specific laws on how to handle this without requiring a mistrial though).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hung_jury
Note that this works regardless of which direction the wrong conclusion is in.
People always talk about it in the case of a juror voting to acquit someone when the evidence is that they are guilty but juror choose to disregard it, but historically it often went the other way. There's a long history of black people in the US, especially in the South, being convicted by all white juries that almost certainly would not have convicted on the exact same evidence if the accused has been white.
I don't know if there is a name for this, so I'll call it reverse-nullification, with nullification just referring to the case of acquittal of someone despite the evidence.
Unlike a nullification case, an reverse-nullification case is in theory correctable. A nullification case is not correctable because an acquittal by a jury cannot be reversed by the judge or an appeals court. A judge or appeals court can reverse a conviction so could correct an reverse-nullification case.
However, as a practical matter that often cannot actually be done because often the judge or appeals court cannot tell that it was an reverse-nullification case. A case often comes down to conflicting stories from witnesses with the jury having to decide which witnesses to believe. The conviction may have been an reverse-nullification or it might just have been that the jury found the prosecution witnesses more believable.
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What do you do so wrong? What is your mechanism of getting rid of those who provide you the healthcare at low efficiency and hight cost? In Europe we have elections and when those don't yield the desired results we storm the HQ and replace by force.
You can't be expecting that when too many people die the insurance company will lose customers and the shareholders will replace the top management, right?
It's better to waste $4.75 by maximizing the inefficiency and costs of the entire system thorough extremely overpriced drugs due to various nonsensical middlemen based market structures, administrative bloat etc. and make 0.25$ than to reduce premiums. Of course it still costs $5 to the society. It might actually be better if they had higher margins...
In any case there should not be a profit motive in (health) insurance.
Regardless, people who are debilitated by injury or illness aren't going to look at 6% and say, "well, jeeze, I guess these guys really are hard done by."
They're going to wonder why something that costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year (health insurance premiums) isn't paying for a medically-necessary procedure, profits be damned.
How much do you think people should pay for some random person to be afforded one more hour of life free of pain? $1000? $1000000? $100000000? More?
> When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
We can compare this to, say, all the people involved in the death camps in Nazi Germany. Who exactly is culpable for murder? Ther person dropping the Zyklon B? Or were they just following orders? The camp commandant who gave the orders? Or were they just following orders? What about the camp guards? What about the train operators? Those who maintained the trains? Those who built and maintained the camps? Those who loaded the trains? Those who detained Jews and other "undesirables"?
In the case of death-by-denail of health coverage, there are many hands involved (hence "social murder"). Personally, I don't blame the people who man the phones, for example. They are coerced into a job. But someone is responsible and you can make a reasonable claim that the CEO fits that bill. Where you draw the line between those two is another question. There are no doubt people working at United whose job it is to come up with creative ways of denying claims. Their bonuses are probably tied to it. You can make a reasonable case that they're aware of the consequences of their action. Are they culpable too?
Additionallly, people tend to view violence as violence or not depending on who does it. Like tossing tear gas cannisters at protestors is not violence but throwing the cannister back is [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
[2]: https://fox11online.com/news/local/charges-filed-against-man...
What about those people that are using United Health Care and getting the support they need? They account for nothing?
By the way, can you help me understand what a 'pre-existing condition' is? Literally nobody outside of America has experience with this term.
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It's insulting to a person's intelligence to tell them "we just don't have the money to cover the surgery recommended by doctors to solve your debilitating injury or illness" and then turn around and give your c-suite seven-figure compensation packages every year while also instituting a dividend for the free riders known as shareholders.
If the company was PERFECTLY run, you're still going to have tons of people getting denied claims. That's what happens with the law of big numbers.
And guess what. You're never going to have a perfectly run company.
If you take the CEOs salary and distribute it to healthcare patients, $50M worth of healthcare is not going to even minutely move the needle.
UHC revenue is $100B PER QUARTER. The CEO's pay is not even a rounding error on a rounding error.
Was the CEO a perfect, honorable guy? No.
Is taking his salary and spending it on patients going to do anything? In the large picture, also, no.
At some point declines are a protection against quackery.
The principle carries in so far as you hold up your contract for covered claims until bankrupt.
Or to use an analogy, which HN absolutely hates and will nitpick since an analogy is never the same thing: you do not get to trespass someone from your airplane while you are in flight. If the airplane catastrophically fails and someone is sucked out, then there is a pass.
It does not appear these denied claims are just people getting sucked out of a catastrophically failed aircraft.
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Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
This is what these health insurance companies are doing routinely. Murder by inaction and calling it anything else is playing in their hands.
The fact that courts are costly and slow is exactly why these companies use them to "delay".
The mess is deeper, but starting an insurance company is not easy either, one could blame the regulations. And then one cannot blame regulations either, it's the regulators/govt who are ultimately voted/allowed by the people. It's a case where every one passes the buck, and so no one single entity is responsible for the mess.
> Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
You do realize that these companies lobby to make sure that it stays inefficient, right?
In the cases where they don't use the court system, they use arbitration, which is usually tilted in the favor of insurance companies.
If you want a fair shake at getting the benefits you paid for, you have to go through the courts. Given the nature of the subject of the lawsuit, there's a real chance that you'll be dead or bankrupt before you get your day in court. That's not a system that works. And when there are systems that don't work, there are on occasion people who will go outside the system to make their own. There is no scenario in which vigilantism is completely eliminated when you have people making massive sums of money off of refusing to do business in good faith.
More people need to read the cautionary tale of Ken Rex McElroy and the town of Skidmore, MO.
This is crazy. Maybe it's not "murder" in the traditional sense but you are making a choice on whether someone gets life-saving care, or lives in immense pain for the rest of their lives until they commit suicide. Again, this kind of normalized violence is justified when it's a business making choices to increase profits. We are so disconnected from our humanity that rounding errors in an Excel sheet mean actual lives are being ended, but that's okay.
- He committed the crime and had another target in mind
- He committed the crime and really didn't think he'd get away with it so he kept it to keep some unknown options open.
- He committed the crime and didn't want any doubt that he was guilty when he got caught. Perhaps he wanted the media to be focussed more on the "why" than "is it him?" speculation.
How about some of the possible reasons he was at a McDonalds instead of many other ways to get food that wouldn't have security cameras
- He was ready to be caught as the media cycle was moving on and he perceived momentum of empathy for him right now
- He was ready to be caught because being on the run was too hard and not inline with his goals
- He wasn't thinking clearly and didn't really have much of a post-shooting plan outside of getting out of NYC
- He felt safe in that town
- He overestimated his support
Seems pretty likely that this was the case. Getting away from the site of the crime is challenging enough!
He was smart enough to carry away the feat without getting caught. He is not smart socially, his demise doesn't serve his purpose. Sounds like fit to be an engineer. And kind of suicidal.
That being said - some obvious stuff he could have done like grow a beard and shave it after and fly out of the country to somewhere cheap like Thailand with $10k
Just 2 days ago, the police reported they found his backpack with jacket inside and a veterinary gun nearby... now he had the same jacket, backpack and another unlicenced gun with him. His eyebrows and nose are different, can clearly see it from the few released pictures.
CCTV footage shows a guy with certain features.
Days later, after no leads whatsoever, another photo shows a guy with markedly different features.
Now authorities say they have caught a guy matching the second footage. He conveniently walked into a McDonalds with his manifesto, fake ID, and a 3d printed gun. ???
Idk man, could be legit I guess... But it is a bit wild that so many people are taking all this at face value, unquestioned; as if there isn't tremendous pressure on authorities to deliver a neatly packaged conclusion to the story at almost any cost.
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