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McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

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Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#551

Post by bumby »

malandrew wrote: post #523
TeMPOraL wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had a basic UBI of, say, $20k, would they quit their job, and not look for work, not work on personal projects, not look to go back to school, nothing, just do what they are assuming others will do, sit around, watch TV, that sort of thing? Rather than keep striving, keep working, and have both an extra $20k being paid to them currently, and that safety net in place in case they lose their job? Depends on p…

There's also nothing stopping people from accumulating all the things they need for a pleasant life of leisure and hobbies and then once they achieve that deciding to freeload off UBI and enjoy those hobbies. I'm less than a decade out from having most of the physical belongings I need for the myriad hobbies I enjoy. Once I get there free time plus 20k a year will be more valuable than being a contributing member of…

>There's also nothing stopping people from accumulating all the things they need for a pleasant life of leisure

I think it’s a stretch to say this is available to most. To say it’s available to anyone doesn’t acknowledge the poor circumstances many are born into simply by chance. While still technically true, the possibility is vanishingly small for many. Policy should be based on what’s best for the general welfare and not a smallish subset

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#552

Post by bumby »

account42 wrote: post #545
malandrew wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also nothing stopping people from accumulating all the things they need for a pleasant life of leisure and hobbies and then once they achieve that deciding to freeload off UBI and enjoy those hobbies. I'm less than a decade out from having most of the physical belongings I need for the myriad hobbies I enjoy. Once I get there free time plus 20k a year will be more valuable than being a contributing member of…

Many hobbies produce things that are immensely valuable to society.

I’ve noticed people sometimes confuse what is valuable to the economy with what is valuable to society. We should defer towards the latter when they are in conflict

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#553

Post by matthewdgreen »

refurb wrote: post #492
matthewdgreen wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the reason that nothing ever changes is because it isn't profitable for things to change, at least not when some moneyed interests can make a profit doing things like predatory lending and others get to have cheap employees. In other words, the lack of a social safety net isn't just some accident that citizens blundered into. It was engineered and continues to be advanced by the people who make money fr…

This is a dumb take. Canada has a very cushy social safety net and still has payday lending with interest rates of 49%. And the alternative of having payday lending is no lending - that is, these folks would have no way of getting a short term loan. Is that better?

I think there's a middle ground between "unrestricted predatory lending" and short term lending. The payday loan industry spends a lot of money on lobbying to push things to the former end (see attached article about 1000% interest rates), and have been very successful [1]. (But the overall lack of a social safety net in the US is due to moneyed interests that go well beyond the payday loan industry.)

Yours is a typical HN binary take that holds a thing must be an utterly unalloyed good or it must be banned, there's no middle ground for a thing to be useful when moderated and regulated, and predatory in other circumstances. This is a very common intellectual failure mode.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/us/politics/payday-lender...

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#554

Post by jessaustin »

nitrogen wrote: post #531
AshWolfy wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sometimes the short term harm inflicted on a few is worth the benefits it will bring society in the long term "Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?"

But who among us has the moral authority to claim which harm is okay on which few? I remain convinced that the path to sustainable progress does not lie in the direction of extremes. Push too hard too fast, and you both amplify your opposition, and risk pushing in the wrong direction. But the great thing is we can all disagree on that, and still agree to work together where we can.

We are constantly gaslit by the war media, so there is a difference between perception and reality. It would not be extreme in any real sense to stop fighting all or even some of our stupid murderous wars. It wouldn't be difficult; we could just... stop. Yet every time there is a suggestion to stop antagonizing Russia or China, or stop attempting to depose every Latin American leader who isn't a right-wing hardliner, or relax the economic sanctions imposed on a third of humanity, or just accept that Near Eastern nations are going to build the pipelines they choose to build where they choose to build them, we are subjected to intense campaigns of sky-is-falling fear-the-brown-people bullshit.

It would not be extreme in any real sense to give labor unions more power, or to imprison fewer people, or to end drug prohibition, or to stop brutalizing undocumented immigrants, or to have less racism enforced by our bureaucracies, or to reign in abusive social media firms, or to provide adequate health care to everyone. All of these things have already been done in particular states and municipalities. Large numbers of Americans already support these things. Even so, armies of Chickens Little lie in wait to assail those who reasonably suggest further improvements.

We got in this position by gradual "sustainable" steps. Shit runs downhill. If everything continues to change in the way it has changed already, in ten years we'll be even further downhill. The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation. Old white people were angered all over the nation. That's why it led to genuine improvements. As Lenin said, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#555

Post by ashtonkem »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #538
ashtonkem wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the law intended for there to be an intent requirement, then the statute itself would say “knowingly” or “willfully”, which it clearly does not. This means that one can accidentally commit conspiracy, so long as the law you’re conspiring to break does not have an intent requirement.

I think we might have to agree to disagree. My understanding is that the conspiracy must intend to break the law. If one party doesn’t know the other is breaking the law, it isn’t conspiracy. If McKenzie didn’t have any illegal recommendations, or knowledge of illegal actions, they are in the clear. If they advised Perdue to do something illegal, that is a different story

> My understanding is that the conspiracy must intend to break the law.

As a general rule, this is not how laws work. There are some laws that require that you know what you're doing is illegal (tax evasion is one of them), but most laws do not work this way.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#556

Post by nitrogen »

jessaustin wrote: post #554
nitrogen wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who among us has the moral authority to claim which harm is okay on which few? I remain convinced that the path to sustainable progress does not lie in the direction of extremes. Push too hard too fast, and you both amplify your opposition, and risk pushing in the wrong direction. But the great thing is we can all disagree on that, and still agree to work together where we can.

We are constantly gaslit by the war media, so there is a difference between perception and reality. It would not be extreme in any real sense to stop fighting all or even some of our stupid murderous wars. It wouldn't be difficult; we could just... stop. Yet every time there is a suggestion to stop antagonizing Russia or China, or stop attempting to depose every Latin American leader who isn't a right-wing hardliner,…

The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation.

And this and a multitude of other things drove some to double down on Confederate culture and eventually led to January 6th. The US abounds with examples of blowback at home and worldwide. That needs to be taken into account somehow in any future strategy for improvement. Giving the best and least committed of your opposition some dignity should make it easier to convince them to work with you to restore the much larger gap in dignity for others, and reduce the blowback.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#557

Post by minikites »

nitrogen wrote: post #556
jessaustin wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are constantly gaslit by the war media, so there is a difference between perception and reality. It would not be extreme in any real sense to stop fighting all or even some of our stupid murderous wars. It wouldn't be difficult; we could just... stop. Yet every time there is a suggestion to stop antagonizing Russia or China, or stop attempting to depose every Latin American leader who isn't a right-wing hardliner,…

The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation. And this and a multitude of other things drove some to double down on Confederate culture and eventually led to January 6th. The US abounds with examples of blowback at home and worldwide. That needs to be taken into account somehow in any future strategy for improvement. Giving the best and least committed of your opposition some dignity should make it e…

Do you think that it is possible to reason with every person? Do you think that if someone simply sat down with every Jim Crow Southerner and explained nicely that black people deserve rights that would have solved the civil rights issues of the 60s?

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#558

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

account42 wrote: post #546
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naval ravikant put it succinctly , the real issue is that once the 51% know they can vote to redistribute the wealth of the remaining 49%, then that opens the door to...well, the JRE clip goes deeper https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eHim7CMOZ6U

And this is supposed to be worse than 1% accumulating most of the wealth how?

Are you ready to argue that the poor are better off when everyone is poor, and inequality is nonexistent ?

Because thats called north korea/ussr... and people routinely risked their lives to escape that equality...

Here is how i think your point of view becomes stronger:

Say inequality exists - but show how did it get there? Is it corrupt wealth? Does inequality persists because movement between wealth levels is becominy stale?

For example, did bezos sell slaves or sell missiles? Or did he get rich getting to sell you stuff which you really like?

Or, is there a chance your avg 1%er could be wiped out tomorrow? Or is being in the 1% sticky...like it is in the UK, Italy and france, where the same 5 families had the same wealth since the middle ages ?

If you have a fair shot at the 1% , and if the road to get there is morally sound, then you wont hear of anyone to complain of inequality.

Show which of the 1% is morally corrupt, and where progress in wealth dynamism is stalling, and im there to argue with you that we need to fix it.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#559

Post by ChrisLomont »

olsonjeffery wrote: post #136
ChrisLomont wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cherry picking bad examples is not how to evaluate how often McKinsey "make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes". Any company the size of McKinsey around as long as McKinsey will have success and failure stories. The proper way to evalaute is to take all things McKinsey did, normalize for background, and see how it performs compared to other methods of solving the same problems. Cherry picking to…

"We can never criticize something unless we can contemplate the totality of it" isn't constructive or helpful and has (from my interpretation) the net effect of stating the the status quo is fine. Is that what you're contending? Firms like McKinsey, for reasons of trade secrets, confidentiality wrt their client book, discretion because of the nature of their work, etc don't have data available about the completeness…

>"We can never criticize something unless we can contemplate the totality of it" isn't constructive or helpful

But you're ok with cherry picking events to suit a narrative when advocating for change? Did you even try to find examples where they were successful in your eyes, or did you simply pick the examples that suit your claims?

>Do you have a proposal for how to conduct such an analysis?

Simply looking at how many customers are repeat customers shows that they're at least doing something their customers are willing to pay for. That's easily a vastly better metric then simply cherry picking examples on one side of an argument.

I'd suspect that current customers are vastly more aware of what value they provide than you'd pick up from news stories, especially if, as you contend, there's no way to know these details from outside views.

They've been around 95 years, 27k employees, 10B in annual revenue, a client list that is incredibly diverse, among every sector of society, among all political parties, and including a huge number of worldwide governments and companies. That alone should make you realize perhaps there is value in what they do, that thousands of customers think so, and that trying to paint them as "McKinsey make bad recommendations that have demonstrably bad outcomes." is probably vastly short-sighted.

You then double down and claim it's probably even worse if one could see inside.

I would weight the opinions of their customers over those obviously cherry picking examples then making un-nuanced and sweeping generalizations. I am content with that approach. Seems more evidence based.

Re: McKinsey to pay $573M to settle claims over opioid crisis role: source

#560

Post by jessaustin »

nitrogen wrote: post #556
jessaustin wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are constantly gaslit by the war media, so there is a difference between perception and reality. It would not be extreme in any real sense to stop fighting all or even some of our stupid murderous wars. It wouldn't be difficult; we could just... stop. Yet every time there is a suggestion to stop antagonizing Russia or China, or stop attempting to depose every Latin American leader who isn't a right-wing hardliner,…

The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation. And this and a multitude of other things drove some to double down on Confederate culture and eventually led to January 6th. The US abounds with examples of blowback at home and worldwide. That needs to be taken into account somehow in any future strategy for improvement. Giving the best and least committed of your opposition some dignity should make it e…

I don't think reasonable people can consider racism a reaction to the civil rights movement that happened in 1960s. Anti-black racism was fostered in what became USA from 17thC, in order to justify slavery. It has been somewhat lessened of late, but if it didn't exist in 1960 there would have been no reason for a civil rights movement. This is like blaming the Native American genocide on recent complaints about it from Native Americans.

So, it's foolish to blame "the events of 1/6" on civil rights organizers. It's also foolish to blame the events on racism. Sure, there were racists involved, but as mentioned above we have had racists in USA for a long time. If they really wanted to have a racist insurrection, they probably would have done it on the occasion of the election of an actual black man, instead of that of an ancient white man whose 93-year record in public office clearly documents that he is also a racist. The occupy-capitol people foolishly identify with a politician whose speech and policies are racist, and that is certainly a large part of his appeal to them. Of course if black people had done similar things they would have been gunned down. Still, the occupy-capitol people never would have turned to Trump if any "real" politician had had a sensible message with respect to national conditions. To name a single example among many, wages have been stagnant since 1971. [0] That's longer than most Americans have been alive. Why doesn't any non-racist politician pretend to care about that?

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

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