Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 324 posts

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#111

Post by caminante »

p4ul wrote: post #56

With all the overdose deaths and the lives ruined by opioids, I guess I'm a little bit surprised this didn't result in criminal charges for someone at McKinsey. Surely there must be some emails or texts that are inculpating.

Did you intentionally not read the article?

> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." DOJ officials said Elling has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice for destroying those company records.

You might've been too busy trying to force "inculpating."

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#112

Post by callc »

hsbshs wrote: post #74
noisy_boy wrote: post #57

Until you have serious bonus clawbacks for every such case, it is just cost of doing business. Just increasing the fines won't do much, they will just fire more people citing costs and the market will applaud that with rising stock price.

Its complex cause you cant really find one person to blame. What no one really says is we are struggling with complexity overload. And what complicates it is all the people's wealth and status accumulation falsely signals control. When they really have less and less control the more complex the system gets. When you look at pentagon leaders and afg/iraq or Wall St CEOs and 2008 gfc or the Pope and the peado army or l…

Sure, attempting to find one or a handful of bad actors to blame may not yield a sufficient result that could convince the public that justice was served appropriately. Yet, the complexity of how to blame should not absolve the crime.

How should society collectively administer punishment to a large complex network of individuals with varying degrees of power and involvement? Reparations and the Nuremberg Trials / Tokyo Trial come to mind for WWII Axis powers. 500k deaths from opiods (taken from top comment) is comparable to the casualties from WWII, within a soberingly low amount of significant digits. Japan was occupied and could not have a military for some time.

Curious if there are other ideas of how to tackle punishment of businesses (not Luigi'ing it).

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#113

Post by raincom »

passwordoops wrote: post #44
sc68cal wrote: post #17

McKinsey makes something like 10 billion annually in revenue. This is a slap on the wrist. People need to be held accountable for these misdeeds.

Criminal charges for execs and board members

Prosecutors have to use RICO to charge execs and board members criminally. This is not going to happen, as long as the revolving door (or a sort of collusion between prosecutors and executives) exists.

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#114

Post by bamboozled »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #88
rqtwteye wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you hide behind a corporation, you can do pretty much whatever you want. Worst case, the company will pay a nominal fine as cost of doing business. And maybe somebody gets fired with a large severance.

Well, until a good looking 20-something year old man puts a couple bullets in your chest outside an investor meeting.

Not going to be "the norm" nor will there be an endless stream of vigilantes available to deter this level of sociopathy. Assassinations are obviously not the way we want society to work either, violence to settle grievances etc, no good.

The only way I think we could hope to stem the tide of this level of corruption is through education. I believe it's really in the ruling classes interest to keep as people as dumb as possible though, so I don't think it will happen.

Not sure what else the alternatives could be. Societal collapse?

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#115

Post by salawat »

hsbshs wrote: post #74
noisy_boy wrote: post #57

Until you have serious bonus clawbacks for every such case, it is just cost of doing business. Just increasing the fines won't do much, they will just fire more people citing costs and the market will applaud that with rising stock price.

Its complex cause you cant really find one person to blame. What no one really says is we are struggling with complexity overload. And what complicates it is all the people's wealth and status accumulation falsely signals control. When they really have less and less control the more complex the system gets. When you look at pentagon leaders and afg/iraq or Wall St CEOs and 2008 gfc or the Pope and the peado army or l…

You say we can't find anyone responsible as if we haven't settled the question on culpability symbolically since we started leveraging hierarchies. You oversee it. You did it.

Start at the top. Move down. Heavy is the head, as they say.

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#116

Post by roenxi »

Retric wrote: post #103
roenxi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which wasn't justified and should probably be an illegal requirement on privacy grounds. It doesn't make a difference if people doing work were vaccinated or not. It turns out to have had little in-practice effect on transmission, so the only important question is whether the passengers on things like a cruise were vaccinated themselves. They were evidence-free policies. We had a great natural case study in Australia…

> It turns out to have had little in-practice effect on transmission When you look at killing thousands of people as a minor consequence you may want to rethink your priorities.

1) Little as in "0, but maybe someone wants to quibble that technically it did something so I'll hedge". As far as I can tell literally everyone I know caught COVID, so it is fair to say the vaccine had no impact on transmission. Raising the obvious question of why it matters where people caught it.

2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.

And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.

3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#117

Post by wrs »

roenxi wrote: post #30
Dylan16807 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government rules around COVID were also a flash in the pan. On a per-day basis it was pretty proportional to the urgency.

Well, yes. We have a society built around concepts of individual liberty and respect for basic human rights. So all the rules were rolled back. The question is why they were rolled out in the first place. Even to this day there is a distinct lack of evidence that any given rule was helpful. We successfully transitioned from a world where everyone was eventually going to get COVID to a world where everyone eventually…

Contagious diseases aren’t compatible with the fantasy that individual liberty is always the highest good. That is why decades ago our society realized the need for public health authorities that can temporarily override individual liberties to protect society.

Undoubtedly not all the COVID measures were perfect. Some ineffective measures were imposed, and some effective measures were not imposed. You can hindsight armchair quarterback that all you want, but there’s no question the authority to impose such measures is needed. And somebody (who thank heavens isn’t you or me) has to exercise that authority with only the information available at the time, and the highest possible stakes.

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#118

Post by aoanevdus »

swasheck wrote: post #18
sc68cal wrote: post #17

McKinsey makes something like 10 billion annually in revenue. This is a slap on the wrist. People need to be held accountable for these misdeeds.

yep. would rather it be a multiple of revenues from their role instead of a percentage.

The parent comment referred to McKinsey’s entire revenue, not to their revenue from their work relating to Opioids specifically.

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#119

Post by freetanga »

bongodongobob wrote: post #85
sitkack wrote: post #3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life They could figure out how to divvy up their 65 life sentences. Why do they get to pay their way out of this? > According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling [2] "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." Corporate laptops are backed up, with backups offsi…

I've never worked anywhere that backed up laptops. Onedrive, fileshares, cloud storage, servers, sure. I would not want to try managing backups for devices that aren't guaranteed online 24/7. The odd failed server backup is enough work, now apply that to 2000 laptops. Fuck that, save your shit on our backed up infra.

They did, or at least Some folders (way before iCloud)

During a project, the live documents were on the teams laptops (local encryption). Only key deliverables were uploaded to servers, mostly at the end of the project.

Lots of cruft (client emails, unedited data, etc) stayed behind in people’s laptops.

Your laptop was stolen? No worries, under 24 hrs you get a new one in your hotel with roughly whenever you left off…

PS McK was handing out 3G - 4G PCMIA cards forever (almost 20 y ago), you were only most of the time…

Re: McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis

#120

Post by newswasboring »

caminante wrote: post #111
p4ul wrote: post #56

With all the overdose deaths and the lives ruined by opioids, I guess I'm a little bit surprised this didn't result in criminal charges for someone at McKinsey. Surely there must be some emails or texts that are inculpating.

Did you intentionally not read the article? > According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." DOJ officials said Elling has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice for destroying those company records. You might've been too busy tr…

Those are not charges for the mass murder they have supported. They are charges for not following procedure. There is a huge difference.
Post reply on HN