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What we know about CEO shooting suspect

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Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#751

Post by Aerbil313 »

iambateman wrote: post #691
mbesto wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Huge disagree - there's no convincingly human anymore for internet text, especially for short internet text. Since the coming of LLMs, when I read HN, Reddit or even blog posts, I always keep it in the back of my mind that whatever I'm reading can very well be written by a bot. Fine-tune/prompt an LLM the right way and you'll get content indistinguishable from human text even for highly specific niche topics/contexts.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#752

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

thegrimmest wrote: post #737
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #728

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#753

Post by abnry »

mft_ wrote: post #643
kypro wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

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 li…

> 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

But it is. Tyrants round up women and children and execute them. Healthcare is more complicated because you have multiple causes at play: the health conditions of patients, the hospitals and what they bill, and the insurance companies.

Money is a big factor here. People talk as if insurance companies should spend unlimited resources on every person. I understand the resentment over wealth inequality, but someone recently calculated that the top 4 billionaires could only support healthcare for everyone for 3 months. Money is not an infinite resource. Rationing is unavoidable.

But I get that there is a problem. Automatic denials and denials over treatments that have clear and significant benefits are a problem, absolutely. And the system could run more efficiently. But we also can't avoid death due to old age or sickness. Nor painless death.

But we can avoid murdering people in the streets in cold blood.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#754

Post by brodouevencode »

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #749
brodouevencode wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far does this carry? Is the charge of the insurance company to keep you alive at all costs?

In a healthy society we wouldn't have "health insurance companies" which are profit driven and are motivated to cut costs, not provide care.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone will have to bear a cost somewhere along the way.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#755

Post by lenerdenator »

brodouevencode wrote: post #742
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #728

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.

How far does this carry? Is the charge of the insurance company to keep you alive at all costs?

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.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#756

Post by dematz »

senderista wrote: post #119

Some perspective: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-...

Imo, spherical cow economist take on a field they know little about. The graphic lumps all "Inpatient & outpatient care" together, which is insane. Is it saying all that money is going to physicians, nurses, etc? It seems to imply that, but my guess is much of it ends up in hospital administration costs. Also in this way the cost of UHC etc isn't just their own admin overhead; it also add the hospital's admin and billing costs of dealing with them.

As for the author's claim that the doctor/nurse/admin assistant should know how much your treatment costs beforehand, lol. Yes, in an ideal world they absolutely would tell you. No, in reality they do not know. There's a whole apparatus of administrators and software spanning the hospital and insurance companies with bajillions of codes and negotiated rates. Noah Smith instead thinks doctors/nurses/admin assistants know ahead of time what each treatment costs but decline to inform consumers? A slightly dated but still relevant book is O'Reilly Hacking Healthcare. Iirc there are whole chapters on billing. It's just very complicated to figure out costs before treatment, and that's the fault of insurance/administration, not doctors/nurses/admin assistants.

It at least implies 2 anti medical worker claims. 1) excess healthcare costs are driven by medical worker salaries 2) medical workers could clarify prices but do not in order to mislead patients. Both totally miss the real problems of healthcare cost: the complexity of admin/billing leads to not just increased costs in insurance companies but also in hospital administration, and obscures costs for patients.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#757

Post by lenerdenator »

3a2d29 wrote: post #730
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #728

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.

Only the CEO or everyone that works there?

How many people in the claims adjudication call center are making ~5 times the median American male's lifetime earnings each year, every year?

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#758

Post by abnry »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #616
kypro wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bel…

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…

There's martial law and there is civil law. Martial law applies to enemies and in wartime. In this case, killing enemies like Bin Laden is acceptable.

However, in civil law, for the state to kill someone it has to be done through the courts. There is evidence given on each side. Killing someone without this is not justice.

People talk as if it is so obvious UHC CEO was responsible for the deaths of many people but he never got to make his case. That's not justice at all.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#759

Post by cedws »

nostrademons wrote: post #716
xyst wrote: post #491

A couple of theories: - 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…

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 h…

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.

Re: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

#760

Post by sroussey »

sizzle wrote: post #680
lr1970 wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also I read it was a 3D printed gun and silencer which is hard to believe just printed it and never practiced or is he trained at shooting?

It does explain the malfunction though.
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