- 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.
I'm sorry you've gone through that and I hope your condition improves. While I don't know the specifics of your case, in general there aren't a lot of real solid evidence-based medicine guidelines for treating back pain or injuries. Ask 10 different physicians and you'll get 10 different treatment plans. Surgery has made many patients worse in the long run. Obviously there are some traumatic injuries where emergency surgery is medically necessary, but for most patients the standard of care should be physical therapy first with surgery being a high-risk last resort.
You can't get approved for surgery without PT in many cases anyway, so by default, most people will have to undergo PT regardless. In a lot of cases, you still can't get surgery; insurance will request pain management via injections and stuff before approving surgery. In my case, I had to go through 6 weeks of PT, then insurance asked me to do another 6 weeks after the first 6 failed to produce benefits. PT accelerated my decline because they didn't understand the mechanics in my case, so it's not always beneficial either. Also some of those conservative treatments (injections) are still being denied by insurance. My dad recently went to get another series of injections and was denied because they didn't think it would be medically beneficial despite the fact that he improved significantly from the first set and it lasted over 6 months.
Unfortunately there's a huge variance in PT quality and skill levels, so just because 6 weeks of PT doesn't produce results doesn't necessarily mean that a different approach to PT wouldn't be better than surgery. Seriously, have you tried visiting a McGill Method Master Clinician? I would certainly try that before letting a surgeon cut on me. Watch the video I linked above and see if it might be relevant.
What sort of injections are you referring to? Corticosteroid injections can sometimes be helpful in the short term but clinical practice guidelines discourage prolonged use due to the risk of bone damage and other severe side effects. So insurers aren't necessarily wrong to deny payment for those.
Spinal problems are definitely on the list why seemingly "not terminally ill" people might want to take the option of euthanasia. Healthy imbeciles will scream with outrage "it's a sin, one must keep them alive at all costs" but that's because it's not them tortured 24/7 but other guy. And people are able to do monstrous things to other people without as much as loosing a night sleep.
Overall, the options for severe chronic pain are: heavy painkillers, physical therapy, wait-and-see (hope they improve) and if not ... dignified exit.
If they improve it takes years. And painkillers are ABSOLUTELY a must during that time but the innocent monsters (largely the rest of the population that is) will cry out "opioid addiction!!!", cut them off and sadistically (in their mind, gently) advise to get over it.
I have no words how much I despise this world. It's all fine and dandy until you lose your health, afterwards you really see it for how it is.
I've learned that most people don't consider themselves to be "bad" or "malicious" overall. People will earnestly espouse opinions of arbitrary quality, with unknown justification and intent, and expect others to agree with them. They don't consider that they may be speaking out of severe lack of empathy or knowledge (Gell-Mann amnesia!). We're extremely limited and oftentimes we don't even recognize it.
> I've had spinal cord compression on my thoracic spine since late 2017 and nobody will touch it
Same here, except I’ve had it since ~2000 (mid-teenager). Anytime a suggested treatment makes it to insurance, they deny it because “it’s extremely uncommon for back problems of someone your age to be in the thoracic spine.” They’ll gladly pay for unnecessary surgeries on the lumbar, but refuse even many diagnostic attempts in the thoracic area.
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.
He won’t get a death sentence for the charges which have been announced so far. Those which are severe enough to carry a death sentence in many US jurisdictions (like murder) are New York state charges, and NY law hasn’t had a death penalty for two decades now or an execution in roughly 8 decades.
If there somehow end up being Pennsylvania or federal charges against him in connection with the murder, those criminal law systems still have the death penalty.
He does currently face some Pennsylvania charges as well, such as firearms charges in connection with the encounter where he was arrested, but none of those are severe enough to warrant a death sentence.
The difference between life-in-prison and a death sentence is pretty minimal, given the length of time it takes in the US to get through the death row process. Decades, typically. Many are never actually executed. In either case, you are expected to die in a jail cell after many, many years of incarceration.
The difference between those two and a non-imprisoned life is... significant.
I wouldn't be shocked if he walks. There is something crazy in the air and I could see a jury nullification happening here. It only takes one. Where are you going to find a jury where nobody on it has the same grudge for more or less the same reasons?
Maybe, or the country collapses before he goes to trial.
I'm reminded of the trial of John Brown. For those who aren't history buffs, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA in October 1859, hoping to steal weapons to arm the slaves and fuel a slave revolt. He was caught and executed in December 1859. The country collapsed into civil war 17 months later, at Lincoln's inauguration. Historians wryly note that John Brown was executed for doing, on a small scale, the same thing that Lincoln did on a large scale 2 years later.
> Where are you going to find a jury where nobody on it has the same grudge for more or less the same reasons?
Jurors are screened for bias, likely questions from the prosecutors will include, "Have you ever been denied a medical insurance claim?" Those who answer yes will definitely not make the jury. Lots of people can answer with a "no" quite truthfully, myself included.
(Note also that I am not making a comment on whether or not I approve of how juries are selected, this is simply how it works.)
> “Have you ever been denied a medical insurance claim?” Those who answer yes will definitely not make the jury.
That’s not a sufficient basis for a dismissal for cause, most people who have ever had insurance would answer “Yes” to that question, and prosecutors don’t have an infinite number of peremptory challenges.
So, they probably won’t dismiss on the basis of that answer alone, but do some followup if the answer is “Yes”.
Counterpoint: I don't know anyone who could answer "no" truthfully. Maybe it's because I am in an older age group?
You're right there are lots of people who can answer "no". However, it's also possible that such a cohort is not a true jury of peers, and remember that juries skew older.
It's possible that screening everyone out who answers "yes" would not be allowed by the judge for this reason. Then, the prosecution would only have a small number of "no reason" exclusions.
> Counterpoint: I don’t know anyone who could answer “no” truthfully.
People who have never personally been insured would answer “no” truthfully, people who have been insured but only consumed in-network, fairly routine services might be able to answer “No” truthfully (though hiccups even with that leading to initial denials are not uncommon), and people under 26 who have only been on their parents insurance and have been shielded from the details of insurance interactions would be able to answer “No” often without intentional misrepresentation.
> However, it’s also possible that such a cohort is not a true jury of peers,
“Jury of peers” is a line from Magna Carta referring to barons’ right to have their guilt or innocence determined by other barons and does not appear in the US Constitution. The limitation on excluding jurors in the US system is that the unlimited number of exclusions for cause that attorneys for either side may request are determined by the judge on the basis of whether the potential juror has sufficient evidence of bias that would make them incapable of rendering a fair verdict, and other exclusions (peremptory challenges) are sharply limited in number, not some assessment of whether the net result is “a true jury of peers”.
> Jurors are screened for bias, likely questions from the prosecutors will include, "Have you ever been denied a medical insurance claim?" Those who answer yes will definitely not make the jury.
In the US, it will be very difficult to find people who can say no to that.
The best question is "do you think wealthy CEOs disproportionately evade justice."
One of the more sympathetic views towards the murderer is that there was no legal avenue to pursue the CEO for mass fraud under which the plaintiffs would get a fair shake. Vigilantism is more welcome by the public when it appears to be the only recourse.
Just for curiosities sake, who did you think would win the latest US presidential election?
I feel like many (most?) people on the internet are kind of disconnected from people's everyday life outside of the internet. I'm guessing that most of the average folks (people outside the internet zeitgeist) never even heard about this assassination, even less cares about the assassin going free if they did.
I guessed correctly on the last 6 elections personally.
I was at a party over the weekend. I asked a room of 30 people what they thought of the assassin and the overwhelming consensus was hero, they wouldn't say anything if they saw him, and if they were on the jury they would acquit. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a replay of OJ Simpson where one of the jurors gave OJ a power fist as he walked out for the verdict. It only takes 1 person to get onto the jury and acquit. Americans love a robin hood.
I'm guessing that makes it pretty clear that it wasn't really a mixed of "real Americans" as almost nothing is so black & white, especially if you compare people who live very different lives.
But, I could be wrong, it has happened before and it's bound to happen again at some point :)
I had the same experience talking to others around here. I guess they aren't "real Americans" either. Or, maybe this is an unusually black & white event.
> Or, maybe this is an unusually black & white event.
I'd say the HN public is the bubble there. Lot of aspiring CEO who take the "don't care with rules if you can get away with it" message to heart so they feel like they have more in common with the victim than with the perpetrator of this murder. While I would not be surprised if it is the reverse for 90% of the USA population.
HN is literally the only place (online or in the real world) I've seen anyone defending this CEO and trying to drum up sympathy for him. You're absolutely right: It's likely that we are the weird bubble outside of everyone else.
>internet are kind of disconnected from people's everyday life outside of the internet.
Are insurance companies more liked among internet users or less liked among internet users (than the population at large)? I presume that internet users tend to be wealthier (due to more free/leisure time, better browsing technology) and less angry with their insurance than non-users, but could be wrong.
A hung jury leads to a mistrial. After a mistrial, the prosecution has the option of trying the case again, but it gets harder (you’ve got more time from the events, a more-tainted jury pool, etc.)
Also, if there are multiple charges, and the jury reaches a not guilty verdict on any charges, that may impact the ability to refile other charges, or make it harder to try them if they can be refiled, because any fact that the jury necessarily rejected in an acquittal is finally decided by that acquittal.
For what it's worth there have been a number of cases of elderly patients holding up a bank for $1 and then sitting in the waiting area to be arrested with the stated goal to get medical treatment. I have no idea how many of them actually end up in jail or get the treatment they desired.
Oh, the precious taxpayer dime! Given to overspending public works, bureucracy, foreign wars, and other bullshit, as well as all kinds of private companies who sculp him!
But god forbid it's also used to treat sick people! Or prisoners.
That’s what happens when you commit a crime. It doesn’t matter who you kill or who you are when you do it. If the CEO had killed this guy in the same manner, he’d be facing the same consequences.
I'd be surprised if they NYPD and the FBI spent anything even remotely close to e.g. 10% of what they did in this cases to investigate any random average murder.
If he just shot someone randomly in a poorer neighbourhood he likely would still be free.
This is generally true for something like gunning down someone in the street.
(Even then: being a cop or the President helps...)
For almost all other crimes, no, probably not.
Even for murder, it's not entirely true; https://nypost.com/2024/12/05/us-news/teen-killed-another-wo... happened on the same day, but certainly didn't see the level of police resources involved in finding the killer. Teams of cops with drones weren't searching large swathes of NYC for those perps.
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
Just because his family is wealthy does not mean that his mother was financially supported for her healthcare. It's quite possible that the family patriarch held the purse strings and deemed that health insurance was the line for their financial support.
I'm in a similar situation with a family member and we are spending around 4-5k/month in a variety of non-allopathic strategies for this family member's health care. However, the family patriarch has drawn the line where his financial support is in providing housing, so the 4-5k is picked up by other family members.
You can be a literal millionaire and bled dry by mounting health insurance claim denials. There is little anyone can do to protect themselves from this outcome, save for not getting sick or becoming a billionaire. The health system in the US is insanely broken.
Non-Allopathic in my case means we’re not dealing with the traditional US medical system. We’re not engaged in homeopathy (microdosing random molecules) at all.
Perhaps what we are doing is still considered allopathic (most strategies are informed with research a la pubmed), with an osteopathic approach (whole body).
The difference here is that we’re able to eschew traditional means (dr appointment, lab test, drug rx feedback loop) of engaging with the medical system, while engaging with non-traditional health related businesses for our own care.
For example, we’re able to validate whether genetic disorders are at play by having sequenced full DNA and matching them against known genetic mutations.
We will order our own blood tests and pay out of pocket to quest, to drive decision making. Same thing a regular doctor would do, but in a far more expedited timeline. It’s a 1-2 day process test a vit D levels to determine and adjust dosing. An average doctor might be 3 weeks out for a 15 minute appointment to write that vit D lab script, then another week out from reviewing and writing the Rx for D.
4-5k a month is the cost of what someone with profound chronic illness ends up paying if they want to do their own R&D, deal with things on their own, in a manner that ensures timeliness and the best care possible. It’s a myth that access to the brightest minds (a la an institution like Mayo Clinic equals the best care, btw)
The money is merely the average in which to access the latest tests, as quickly as possible, medical equipment normally inaccessible to the general public and test and treatment options an engaged and highly trained MD that practices something such as precision medicine might suggest at the height of their careers’ charging power.
It also helps that the patriarch is a retired MD and can let us engage with the system out of band by writing scripts for medications that would be unavailable to the average public.
When lives and suffering are on the line, and we’re in these highly compensated roles, 4-5k/month is a privilege to spend for loved ones. Much of it may be lit on fire, so to speak, in personal r&d efforts, but each of them yields a win that gets us closer to a healthy baseline.
I think in casual speech "equally possible" usually is taken to mean "also possible." I think most people would say "equally likely" to express what you're saying.
For what it’s worth, I am a native English speaker and I disagree with the other poster. I would interpret “equally possible” similarly to how you did.
For what it's worth, to me, "it's equally possible" means "it's also possible, however remotely". I know it doesn't make sense, but, then again, neither does "I could care less".
How exactly do you propose to prove something (planting evidence) didn't happen?
Maybe I have too low expectation about USA interface between law enforcement and judiciary, but here in Poland there were many high-profile cases of misconduct of public prosecutors that colluded with the police. The only "proven" cases were about purposefuly destroying evidence: breaking CDs that held incriminating recordings, wiping weapons to remove fingerprints, agreeing to single version of testimony etc. They used procedural quirks to prevent defence from challenging those "mishaps" (like in one high-profile case with broken CD, they argued defence-held copy cannot be submitted, because of continuous custody requirements). Cases with planted evidence were always he-said-she-said, because when police writes a search report where they said you had something, then you have no way to challenge that.
May I add, fraud around those arrest/search reports (however they're called it English) is rampant. It starts with simple things, like notifying the subject about right to attorney. They just tick a box that you declined to summon attorney, and you have no way to challenge that, other than refusing to sign the paper, act of which carries no value.
We're deep, deep into speculation here. I'd wager that as the profile of the case goes up, so too does the dilligence and carefulness of the evidence chain of custody.
They're often not technically pro-bono. Clarke, for example, gets paid by the government, because they have a vested interest in not having cases overturned on appeal due to insufficient counsel.
> Clarke would probably not want anyone to feel indebted to her. In fact, after the Smith case, she returned the $82,944 fee the state paid her, saying that other indigent defendants could use it more.
this will potentially be a self-defense case. since the shooter had chronic back pain, he could argue that shooting the ceo who denied his healthcare was his only means of protecting himself
That's not how criminal trials work. There are no free speech rights in court. Defendants can't just argue whatever they want. Judges have wide latitude to prohibit certain defenses and generally ban both the prosecution and defense from mentioning legally irrelevant points. Self defense is clearly codified under NY state law and this case doesn't even come close to meeting that standard.
Lawyers tripping over each other to have their names associated with a potentially historic case. Remember how the Kardashian family originally became famous and some of them are billionaires now.
> Simpson was the best man at Kardashian and Kris Houghton's wedding in 1978.
> Following the June 12, 1994, murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson stayed in Kardashian's house to avoid the media. Kardashian was the man seen carrying Simpson's garment bag the day that Simpson flew back from Chicago. Prosecutors speculated that the bag may have contained Simpson's bloody clothes or the murder weapon.
> As one of Simpson's lawyers and a member of the defense "Dream Team", Kardashian could not be compelled or subpoenaed to testify against Simpson in the case, which included Simpson's past history and behavior with his ex-wife Nicole, and as to the contents of Simpson's garment bag.
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.
People can have contradictory motives. People in real life aren't driven by carefully considered system of beliefs. Only in fiction are people required to make sense.
We just make enough sense to mostly get by in the world.
That said, apparently his manifesto is fairly short and honestly sounds more like a confession than an actual political manifesto.
My point is more that usually when you hear about a killer having a manifesto you expect a lenghty diatribe about what they think is wrong with society and why they think what they did helps fix it - whether it's early 20th century "propaganda of the deed" anarchists, late 20th century "fall of the West" primitivists or early 21st century "race war" white supremacists and "new crusade" Christian nationalists. Of course for e.g. Islamist terrorists you don't even need a manifesto because everyone knows the cliff notes version already (Western imperialism, Islamic caliphate, blasphemy, etc). Instead this guy seems to have largely been upset with privatized healthcare, which is a common sentiment but rarely enough to motivate someone to pull off such an elaborate stunt.
That his manifesto is pretty rushed and incomplete does support the idea that he's more mentally unstable than genuinely "politically radicalized" though. The Christchurch shooter's manifesto for example was fairly incoherent and seemed more like an elaborate trolling attempt than a sophisticated political tract but clearly some effort went into it. Luigi's almost feels like a half-hearted homework assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if he quickly wrote it after the killing on a whim and didn't give it much thought before, which again would fit with my impression that he really focused on the first killing and didn't plan out much beyond that. As someone struggling with ADHD and autistic hyperfixation (not saying either of those apply to him), I can relate.
They don’t even need to actually tie him to the killing to put him in jail for a long time - possession of an illegal suppressor is a slam dunk here, and that’s major jail time.
It wouldn’t help him with any of the rest of this mess, but possessing the illegal suppressor is an easy ‘we can keep him in jail until we figure out the rest of this’ situation.
> all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" [...] and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him
I don't know about your country, but in my country if you look like the person shown on CCTV committing a crime, you're wearing the same jacket, you're carrying the same illegal gun, and you're carrying a handwritten manifesto justifying the crime?
That's enough evidence for a normal jury of normal people to convict. The cops don't really need to add any DNA or CSI woo, juries are capable of exercising common sense.
Only way there's reasonable doubt here is if the guy's carrying the first place trophy for the CEO shooter lookalike contest.
Yeah, that's why I'm pointing it out. It's like the police is trying to oversell their investigative work in the public image, which strongly suggests that they had very little hand in actually catching him and now try to compensate - whether it's because they really were tipped off by a McDonald's employee or because the FBI found him doing something fishier. But the fact he had everything on him strongly suggests that the McDonald's story is at least credible.
It's pretty humiliating if you have a big militarized police force and can't catch a guy who killed a big important CEO in public and then went on wearing the murder suit in public until a random McDonald's guy calls you up and literally tells you where to find him, in public.
Remember when hundreds of militants crossed the most secure border wall in any "Western" country ever both on foot, in vehicles and on paragliders and went on to massacre literally over a thousand people including hundreds of reservists before the second most overfunded military in the world was able to put a stop to them and stupidly ended up killing civvies and friendlies in the crossfire because it has a doctrine of preventing hostage taking at any cost?
Remember when the US spy agencies prevented a credible terrorist plot by accidentally catching a guy in the Middle East carrying a thumb drive with terrorist plans on it?
Surveillance exists to maintain control, it can't help establish it. Dragnet surveillance exists to reconstruct events, not to prevent them. And most importantly, it all exists to suppress, not to protect. It's about dominance, not security.
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?
> Conference probably had a hotel block they were booking and a link to book so you know which hotel to camp.
In this case it was Hilton. And if the CEO stayed at Hilton he had no reason to be on the street outside the hotel where the killer was waiting for him. Somehow the shooter knew that the target is not staying at the Hilton and will be walking to the front entrance. BTW, the normal practice for high profile individuals to arrive in a car to a service entrance hidden from the public.
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.
Yep. Also, if you're trying to surprise someone at their arrival to an event, you absolutely do arrive super early to wait for them rather than try to guess their exact arrival time. If the target had arrived in mid morning after missing the opening speech instead, his killer would have waited. If the target had made a late decision not to attend, we'd have probably found out about the killer via the next event or next target
One can be 100% sure the guy is gonna at least be at the conference, and humans tend to be predictable. He was also fairly likely to be at the venue the day before getting prepared.
This is exactly what us hunters do year after year, time and time again. Drive for hours, hike for miles. Gathering what information we can. Then at some point we have to make assumptions and commit to some scenario in hopes it pans out the way you assume.
A tremendous amount of time and effort is spent with it all riding on a few, hopefully, well placed assumptions. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Usually your acquaintances only hear about the times the hunt works out. Same with this. We only hear about it, because it worked out for the hunter
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.
No, it won't. It's possible to 3d print suppressors that withstand multiple shots, even mag dumps if they're made robustly enough.
He needed a Neilsen device or piston in the suppressor to assist with cycling on the action, which he didn't have.
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.
edit: i'll speculate and say the suppressor still worked after the shooting because he still had it on him. if it was melted or broken, he may have been more apt to toss it.
Do you think he practiced before this or took a leap of faith with a possibly defective printed silencer? It’s bonkers to me that he would just hope for the best and possibly have it fail during the encounter and also it’s curious that he knew about the racking thing with every shot.
I mean he’s clearly a bright individual, Ivy League and comp sci major and all so did he study YouTube videos or something?
>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.
>547 so far this year. If we had equal justice for all in this country, this CEO shooting would have barely made local news, maybe.
Don't lie at us with statistics like that. The bulk of those so called "mass shootings", normal crimes gone off the rails and other things that are nowhere near what people think when you use the words "mass shooting", which is almost certainly the slight of hand you're going for.
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition. While what you say and like you reference is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader to portray it as you did. The typical mass shooting on that list consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime (usually a crime for profit gone off the rails or the drug industry DIYing dispute resolution) wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
Pretty much every mass shooting by the colloquial definition makes the national news. I am unaware of any one that has not.
> Pretty much every mass shooting by the colloquial definition makes the national news. I am unaware of any one that has not.
Now that sounds like obvious selection bias. Also, the Wikipedia article says "specifically for the purposes of this article, a total of four or more victims". But the point about the categorization is well taken. As the article says: "Many incidents involving organized crime and gang violence are included."
And this ‘mass shooting’ list also includes injuries NOT caused by shooting. What’s the point of that?
“ A man was killed and three women were injured when they fired upon in a vehicle on eastbound Roosevelt Road near Cicero Avenue in Cicero. The victims fled north onto Cicero Avenue into Chicago where they crashed, leading to three others being injured in the crash.[16]”
The disparity is laid bare by the fact that this wasn’t even the only murder in lower Manhattan on that day. One gets a multi-state manhunt and the top spot on national news for days. The other got a shrug.
Doesn't it make sense for police to go after high profile killings? If they catch the CEO killer that's more good press for them, and if they were slacking there's more chance that they'll get hounded for it.
Sure. NYPD is doing the rational thing in a society that treats the murder of a wealthy CEO as a much worse crime than the murder of a semi-homeless maybe-illegal immigrant.
And in a society that strongly valued equality before the law, they wouldn’t dare treat the two cases so differently. Thus we can see that we don’t live in such a society.
>And in a society that strongly valued equality before the law, they wouldn’t dare treat the two cases so differently. Thus we can see that we don’t live in such a society.
How would "equality before the law" as you described even work? If some celebrity got killed and people wanted to contribute their resources into finding their killer, is that suddenly bad now? If my son got killed and I'm trying to find his killer rather than doing the Right Thing™ by devoting my time equally among all unsolved murder cases, am I a bad person?
Is a police department that shrugs and says "we'd want to solve this high profile murder that everyone wants solved, but because of 'equality' we have to solve this gangbanger murder that nobody cares about" really what we want? Isn't a government that's responsive to citizen demands also an ideal? What happens if they conflict?
>Keep in mind, for this case in specific, a huge number of people did not want it solved
Where? If you go by reddit, there's a "huge number of people" who want to see society collapse in a socialist revolution, but that's clearly not representative of the overall population. Even the disparity between the support for kamala vs at the polls was stark.
If you go by literally any venue where people talk. There is, at the minimum, widespread 'darn - a completely awful human was killed - what a shame' mentality everywhere, and across the political spectrum.
Justice is not defined by the law, but by personal values. The prosecutor in this case is going to be obsessive in ensuring that none of the jurors understand their legal right to jury nullification, because if they do - this guy stands a very high chance of a mistrial - if not outright acquittal.
>If you go by literally any venue where people talk. There is, at the minimum, widespread 'darn - a completely awful human was killed - what a shame' mentality everywhere, and across the political spectrum.
that's... not the same thing being argued a few comments up? ie.
"Keep in mind, for this case in specific, a huge number of people did not want it solved"
I don't think it's controversial that the CEO isn't well liked, or that some (most?) people thought his death was a net good, but that's not the same as actively wanting the murder to not be solved.
Your concerns about some people being more deserving of a good investigation reminds me why it's great that hospitals will serve everyone, even if they are a gangbanger.
Because it paints the image that normal innocent people are getting shot up in schools and markets more often than they really are, primarily to push the narrative that guns need to be taken from people who have committed no crimes, to stop crime.
In reality, the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other. Whether it be with a legally-purchased gun, an illegally-purchased gun, a homemade gun, a knife, a homemade shank, a baseball bat, a vehicle.
>normal innocent people are getting shot up in schools and markets [often]
>the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other
Both of these things can be true. You can have a rampant gang violence problem, and also a rampant school shooting problem. The fact that the gang problem is worse doesn't make the school shooting problem okay, and to use this to argue against gun control is... odd.
The point is that gun control isn't solving anything but eliminating what many Americans perceive as a fundamental right, because bad people do bad things with neutral items. You can stab dozens of people mortally before you're put down. You can mow a crowd of people down with your vehicle. But I carry a gun every day out of the possibility that someone might do one of those things to me, or my loved ones.
Banning a right is the worst bandaid "fix" possible, on top of what is a much more fundamental problem that can't be solved by merely stopping one of its symptoms. Our people are sick in multiple ways. Let's fix that.
Suicide makes up 55% of gun deaths, and the US is literally the only country in the world that counts these as gun violence. The remainder is primarily gang violence. Shooting of non-gang affiliated people is extremely rare, and noteworthy because of this rarity. Murder-suicides are also rare, about 1% of suicides.
Most discussion and statistics about gun violence intentionally obfuscates these facts. We could speculate about the motivations why, but it is largely irrelevant.
You seem to be hinting, by your choice of statistics, that gun violence in the USA is not the pressing social issue it is commonly made out to be. (We could speculate about the motivations why, but it is largely irrelevant.)
Since I disagree, I will offer my own statistic: the leading cause of death in the United States among children and adolescents is gunshot wound.
I would agree that gun violence is a serious issue. However, I think most people are misled/misinformed about nature of the problem, who is at risk, and their personal risk.
I think that the risk is highly concentrated on a subset of people, an individuals can take simple actions to remove themselves from that subset.
Examples would be if you steer clear of gangs, drugs, and abusive partners, your risk is drastically lower than the national average. The same is true for your kids, especially if you don't keep guns in your house.
Now, I still think it's a problem that other Americans are dying from gun violence, even if I don't think I am personally at much risk. I will admit that this does reduce the sense of urgency I feel, and I suspect that this is why the numbers are obfuscated.
The groups that want to reduce gun violence rightly understand that personal fear is a greater motivator then general concern for the well-being of others, so the narrative exaggerates the former and not the letter. This is why you get lone suicide grouped with home invasion for gun violence statistics. It is why you get 2 gang members shot in a drug deal gone bad classified with school massacres as mass shootings.
Not off-hand. Last time I looked into it, tagging homicide associations was a pretty messy business. I think drug related gun homicides and gang homicides two side to the same coin.
I've seen numbers on the order of 10% for intimate gun partner homicide. The percent is much higher for women, but women are a minority of gun homicide victims overall.
I looked at a variety of sources for the above numbers, but it certainly didn't seem like gang- or drug-specific associations drove the majority of non-suicide gun deaths. A decent chunk, but there are other reasons.
One surprising / not surprising other fact: ~50-75% of gun deaths involve alcohol and ~25% meth.
Parent specifically said “shooting deaths”, which technically includes guns shooting the person holding them in any country.
Gun suicide specifically affects white conservatives males and their kids more than any demographic. Either it’s access to guns, or conservatives are particularly more depressed (or maybe they lack access mental health services?). Having a friend die this way when I was in high school (and knowing no one who was shot and killed by someone else), it’s particularly real to me.
True, let me revise. The majority of "shootings" are suicides, which can be carried out in all manner of ways. The second largest contributors are gangs and organized crime. The smallest, by far, is what people actually picture in their mind when they hear "mass shooting".
Guns are an easy way to do it with a higher success rate. It is really hard to stab yourself to death even though it’s possible, for example. Who knows what would happen in Korea if guns were legal.
Because it's mostly business dispute resolution and it dominates the stats if you include it.
It's not like you can ask the courts to use state violence on the guy that shorted you come coke or to kick that other gang's dealer off your turf because he's already been warned once. Illegal industry has to DIY it.
To include it would be like compiling a list of extortion and including government fines and civil judgements. It dominates the stats so much that if you include it and evaluate it you're not actually looking at the thing you want to be looking at, you're measuring by proxy the size of something else. You'll wind up deriving conclusions like "most mass shooters are low level gang members" or "the threatening party in most extortion is the state" that is nominally true but also absurd doublespeak not actually congruent with the meaning of those words.
Why? I'm not in a gang or a mob, so i am safe from their silly little squabbles. I don't care how many gang members kill each other. I also don't care how many people die in DRC civil wars, because I am not in the DRC. I don't care about people dying on other planets and in different galaxies.
Ah yes, because no one innocent has ever died from gang on gang violence, and nobody has ever been wrongfully identified as a gang member and been killed.
I don't personally care about what's going on in the DRC either, but I do care about the entire city being safe as I don't want to die from accidentally taking a left turn.
We all agree most normal people have an aversion to killing. You're saying that having an aversion to killing stops people killing, which is a tautology. And then you say it's not about consequences. What's your explanation then?
It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence, every day, everywhere. Have you never seen a fight/argument on the street suddenly diffuse when a cop appears? Or eg, a guy drunk at a bar, starting to raise his voice in anger at someone, only to simmer down when he sees the bartender walking over because he doesn't want to be kicked out?
Awareness of consequences is a necessary precondition for people to course-correct. That's an essential feature of people: we are able to notice when we're on course toward a bad outcome (whether that's harm to oneself, or harm to someone/something we care about, or any undesirable situation), and so take responsibility for our actions in advance so we can change course. Without that we'd be amoral creatures. This is what makes us moral beings – that we can take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. This is a good thing. It's what makes us people, and it's the basis of having a civilisation that is mostly peaceful.
It’s not a tautology. The aversion to killing is an inherent psychological thing. Some things are just fundamental to a person’s psychology. Some people have such a strong aversion to spiders that they can’t go near one, even when they know for certain that it’s harmless and there would be no consequences. And psychologically healthy people have that sort of aversion to killing another person. It’s inherent programming.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.
> You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
There is a difference between a bar fight and killing someone with intent. A bar fight is a fight for dominance, like you see in animals, the outcome is rarely fatal as the point is just to establish who is stronger and who should submit.
We have an aversion to killing that goes further than the fear of consequences. It can be seen in the military, where soldiers naturally don't want to kill their enemies, even when they have incentives to do so. To be effective, soldiers have to be desensitized to killing through their training. Enemies are dehumanized, they train on human shaped targets, etc... And even with all that training, after a few years of active service, many start questioning their life choices. It is common for military pilots, who enlist for the love of flying, until they realize what they are really doing, i.e. killing people. When that happens, it is time to retire to a noncombatant job.
Punishing crime is not useless, but I think saying that consequences are the cause of aversion for killing is backwards. We have a natural aversion for killing, especially when we are in a prosperous situation like we (the first world) are now in. And that's why we take murder so seriously.
And speaking of murder, our natural aversion for killing shows when we see how we treat the death penalty nowadays. The death penalty is (generally) for the worst people humanity has to offer, their killing have been approved by the highest authority, and there is still opposition. We even have rituals to offload the responsibility of killing from the executioners. For example by having a random person in a firing squad fire a blank round.
>You're saying that having an aversion to killing stops people killing, which is a tautology. And then you say it's not about consequences. What's your explanation then?
It's a fairly straightforward understanding. If I said I have an aversion to the taste of steak, would you require additional information to why I don't eat steak? Or, to put it in your terms, eating steak causes a negative internal state for me and doesn't require any external consequence to make me avoid it.
>It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence
There's a problem with relying on "intuitive" understandings in some cases, especially when there is contradictory evidence. I think the term for your stance is "deterrence theory/effect." In this case, I believe there are plenty of studies that show harsher consequences do not reduce crimes rates (or at least have marginal effects). People are not rational actors, especially in highly agitated emotional states.
One can have an aversion to the act itself without considering the consequences. People who have never gotten in a real fight before don't understand that its actually quite difficult to throw a full-strength punch at someone if you've never done so before. It's not the consequences that you're considering in that moment, but an aversion to the violence itself.
I did say almost. Putin is kind of the extreme example.
If someone is willing to live like an absolute hermit in basically a police state, hiding behind layers and layers of security apparatus, engaging lookalikes and only allowing the loyalty-tested anywhere near him, survival odds improve quite a bit.
But for anyone trying to live anything remotely approaching a normal life, or with any real freedom, your continued survival is completely due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in your world have a personal breaker against murder.
> 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.
I think it is more informative to think of a time you planned a big trip, especially if things went really wrong on the trip or there was a significant problem. Looking back with hindsight, I can see how I may have failed to see and adapt to an issue before it got bigger or that I act irrationally because I’m stressed and I haven’t let go of a preconceived notion and accepted the new situation. I have wondered why I didn’t investigate something beforehand that now seems obvious and important. There have been cases where sheer dumb luck saved me or screwed me. Afterwards I could say I should have had a backup X or should have planned Y ahead of time, but I didn’t see or do those things.
There are so many moving parts in a situation like this that it is impossible to think of everything, and the things you don’t think of will look obvious to people after the fact. The dumb luck situations that save you or screw you can be interpreted as inside knowledge. His bumbling actions afterward from the outside might seem like a “why wouldn’t he just do this instead” without thinking about how the mental toll, stress, and panic of being hunted by the whole country could degrade your judgement.
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.
We amateur criminologist assume intent in every clue. But Luigi, just like Roskalnikov, probably was a mixture of guilt, incompetence, and mental breakdown, as the reality of his situation and its hopelessness took over his thoughts.
Anyone speculating too far should think how well they would sleep after shooting someone on the street and fleeing the biggest manhunt in recent history. Then ask themselves what kind of decisions they could make after 2 days of no sleep and immense stress.
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.
People on HN skew young, smart (in one domain), and tend to live in a bubble of similar people. If you know you're smart, the smart people you talk to validate your smartness (in one domain), society validates it some more by paying you massive amounts, and you're not experienced enough to know better, you're bound to overestimate your abilities and knowledge.
It needn't be most, or even many on HN, and people of all kinds vastly overestimate their abilities. It's just that on HN it's overestimating with great ambition.
So funny to jump to the "they're just kids" explanation for this when we are literally talking on a forum hosted by a VC incubator.
Is it not Occam's razor that people are like this because this world of startups, "cutting edge tech", "move fast and break things", etc. gives quite clear incentives to be like this? The entire of financial world of tech is quite significantly propped up by the inertia of unearned confidence!
> If you know you're smart, the smart people you talk to validate your smartness (in one domain), society validates it some more by paying you massive amounts, and you're not experienced enough to know better, you're bound to overestimate your abilities and knowledge.
And then you become the richest man in the world and buy Twitter and show everyone that you're kind of just clueless outside of your area of expertise, but putting up with you is profitable enough that people just go with it.
Eh, I'm nothing of the sort, I'm only advancing in years and have made it a point to exist in as many segments of society as I could. I was that cocky engineer once, my words are only anecdote from first-hand experience and observation. I never expect to be right, only hopefully more right than wrong.
How would discourse change to eliminate this problem? Should we only speak about topics we are employed in? Lead each comment with a summary of our qualifications, or a proclamation of humility where we signal how little we know?
I know you jest, but I think it wouldn't be a bad idea at all. There are languages whose grammar forces the speaker to explicitly clarify the source of information; Eastern Pomo, for example, has different verb forms for whether it's something you know first hand, saw, are repeating, or deducing. I imagine it's not only useful for the listener, it also helps the speaker realise if maybe they are building a shaky argument to make a point. I, for one, would be interested to see that system in English, it could lead to interesting developments.
See, you put the caveat at the bottom, but I think you are just having a normal discussion. You aren't speaking "very confidently," you are just making an argument.
What I think happens is people who are very knowledgeable about a subject are hyper-sensitive to slightly incorrect information. And to boost their egos they like to diminish the people making the incorrect statements as not just incorrect, but confidently incorrect, a la Dunning Kruger.
See how confidently I made the exaggerative statement above? I don't necessarily mean it to be completely true, but I am making an argument. I think an assessment of confidence requires more than seeing no mollifying qualifiers like "I think" or "it might be". There's no verbal tone on the web.
It was a little meta-joke, but I think the world could use a lot more expressions of doubt. Very few things are certain or universally true, and those that do tend to have Greek letters in them. I find highly confident people highly suspicious, and a culture that rewards overconfidence and punishes doubt both exhausting and dangerous.
Probably because people on the internet like to hear opinions on things like psychological and sociological factors from people who have simply stated an expertise in semiconductors...
overconfidence leads to participation which results in measurable statements and artefacts, under confidence does not. people are loud and (mostly) incorrect or silent.
But why would those "measurable statements and artefacts" lead one to believe they are competent? Presumably, wouldn't they also provide evidence of one's ignorance if they were evaluated objectively?
(If it wasn't clear, I'm poking at the idea that we have numerous biases that prevent objective evaluation)
My (unpopular) take--programmers have been 'gassed up' by a decade of overcompensation + title inflation.
People think the high pay and the fancy titles* they're (often) given reflects their value or intellect*, even subconsciously, and they behave in such a manner.
*Sorry, I don't consider web programming (which comprises a majority of modern software development) "engineering"
*Many are some of the most intelligent people quite literally on Earth, or are otherwise exceptional.
heh yeah i think we're coming up now on two generations of our brightest minds being spent on making us more isolated from each other and clicking on ads.
Ivy Leaguers are trained, often from birth, that they are better than the rest of us plebs because of their “merit” and represent a superhuman caste. This guy was most likely the same way.
If you’re told that you’re a superhuman, then why not think you can get away with it?
Oh, it's not just Ivy League although of course that usually comes with a background of privilege and prestige that further compounds on this tendency. STEM people in general heavily demonstrate this tendency. MBA types too, although they tend to think the solution always comes down to treating everything as a business or privatization.
Intelligent people are not any less likely to be delusional than anyone. They are however, much better at convincing themselves and others of their delusions.
People that have logic training such as lawyers and engineers even more so.
Or just take this story, where people who haven't even punched a CEO are making up detailed "theories" about the actions and motivations of someone who shot one dead.
Being educated isn't really representative of Hacker News. There are very clear dynamics here where being more knowledgeable makes the discussions irrelevant.
There are generally two ways of doing hard things. Either you are knowledgeable enough to be aware of the challenges and work around, or overcome, them. Or you are unaware, or shameless, enough to do it anyway. The later is much easier than the former. (Then you also have those who believe they could do something but never does because they can't). (Also not entirely mutually exclusive).
Sometimes this is a feature of education, but most of the time it is just a feature of ignorance. Being educated doesn't also prevent you from being ignorant. It is very much expected that most willing to do something hard are smart enough to do it, but not smart enough to do it well. Unless it's been made easier, but then it is no longer as hard.
It is also perception. Knowing both software and hardware would make you a technologist, or when talking about hardware someone who knows hardware but also knows software. Not knowing hardware but talking about it would more likely make you perceived as someone who knows software. And going back to the beginning, it is easier to think you know software than to actually know it.
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.
I don't understand most of these terms, and I'm curious how much of that is me being a dummy, or just not consuming a generous amount of some very specific bubble's jargon.
Edit: to clarify, when you go down the rabbit hole of certain bubbles, you come across terms that nobody will know unless they've gone down those same rabbit holes. Occasionally when you come up for air, you might find yourself using those terms as if they're broadly known.
He's definitely fitting the cliché of "STEM graduate who thinks they have all the answers to social problems without reading any previous works on the subject". E.g. he thinks Japan's cultural problems are a bigger issue than its birth rate itself (correct) but thinks part of the solution involves banning conveyer belt sushi bars because they enforce social isolation by having machines instead of workers (incorrect). He clearly takes inspiration from the Unabomber Manifesto but seems to focus on the primitivism instead of trying to understand the underlying social dynamics and power structures (which you might expect if he were a "leftist" as many initially assumed).
You can take a person out of his ivy league STEM background but you can't take the ivy league STEM background out of a person, or something.
> but thinks part of the solution involves banning conveyer belt sushi bars because they enforce social isolation by having machines instead of workers (incorrect)
Why are you thinking he's incorrect? I mean, a debate can be had if bans are the correct tool, but there is a massive trend in hospitality in general (both restaurants and lodging) to de-personalize the entire experience, to take the human service out of the loop and make it invisible where it still needs to take place:
- hotel booking? no travel agents, no phone calls, anyone can just do that themselves with bookingdotcom and other aggregator service.
- hotel on-site service? no check-in at the reception, you go to a terminal, enter your booking id, get a keycard and that's it. when you check out, you close the door, dispose of the key card, and you haven't seen or interacted with any human during the entirety of your stay.
- food ordering? you sit alone at home, scroll through a list of restaurants that might not even exist ("ghost kitchens"), a computer orders a human to make the food, said anonymous person (and maybe some colleagues) makes your food, another anonymous person gets ordered by a computer to deliver it to your doorstep, and if you specify a non-contact delivery you didn't have to interact with a single human for anything. And I think it won't take long for the cooks to be replaced by machines as well, delivery robots are already a thing.
- on site food eating: you don't order at a server any more, you order at a terminal, a tablet or even your own phone, the computer dispatches cooks and servers, some even don't have human servers any more but only robots or running-sushi-style conveyor belts, and in the end you pay at a machine.
So yes, "running sushi" is definitely a good example how human to human interactions are outright eliminated from our lives.
Fwiw, the conveyor belt sushi place I last went to did not feel any less personal than a typical restaurant, and did not seem to have fewer interactions with people than any place below a relatively fancy date spot
That was my point. It's an evocative image if you don't think about it too long but if you've ever seen one it's no different from any other fast food place. Unless you're a frequent customer, you're probably not going to develop any meaningful relationships with service workers - this is especially true for chain/franchise establishments and the rare exceptions I can think of are "mom and pop" style places which have all but vanished. You go to a places operated by service workers to socialize with other patrons (especially if they accompany you there, like on a date or group event), not the staff. In many cases the staff are literally required not to have genuine human interactions with you because they're being paid to be nice to you.
An Ivy League STEM background is not capable of educating him on the issues he's grappling with. Now an Ivy League Arts background might.
Unfortunately there's just not enough time in the day to really dig into the issues he's grappling with when there's an overwelming course load of databases and physics etc.
I hope he's not right about Japan because since covid I talk to even less people. Restaurants have automated not just ordering, but reservations and payment too now.
Of course he's right. The influence of conveyor belt sushi specifically seems very dubious (isn't it just an unusual novelty?) but any social trend that has people meeting and talking to others less frequently will have people meeting potential partners less frequently. What is the advice always given to people looking for a partner? Go out and meet people. Meet as many people as you can to increase your odds. Any aspect of Japanese society that reinforces or facilitates social isolation has a share of the blame for their demographic problem.
Well, this is the defining trend of our technological progress. People getting what they want makes them unhappy in the long, multigenerational term.
We innovate because we like being comfortable. We don’t want to tend to a fire constantly to be warm. We don’t want to depend on the randomness of hunting/foraging to have a full belly. We don’t want to take days and days of travel to go a few towns over. We don’t want to have to deal with people we don’t know because that’s anxiety inducing.
So we invent all those things that means many modern humans can just stay comfy, warm and fed at home with all their basic needs met without having to go through all this discomfort.
The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless
(and to top it all the planet is on fire).
> The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless (and to top it all the planet is on fire).
None of that is true. You're projecting what some people struggle with onto everyone, when the data indicates people are better off today. And mental health issues aren't unique to the industrialized world. Also, the planet is warming, but it's not on fire. Total exaggeration.
But some billionaire did a TED talk where he said that the global poverty rate has been constantly declining, which is true, even if it is not meaningful if you remove it from the real-world context of purchasing power, social safety nets, support networks and shared commons, and only a positive if you think sweatshops are good because they create job opportunities.
> And what "purpose" are people looking forward to?
What, you don't find increasing shareholder value compelling?
> It's not literally burning, so it's fine?
Presumably they think the climage catastrophe is not a big deal. "On fire" is clearly hyperbole but the point is that we're on a fast track to total global economic collapse (to say nothing about the death and destruction itself) as long as the answer is to carefully do some ineffective reductions and give more money to the industry to spend on "carbon capture" technology that creates more emissions in the process of being built, maintained and operated than it could ever hope to capture, but I digress.
It's not just about exposure to other people. It's also about facilitating genuine human connections. Japan's work culture is detrimental to life outside the workplace but the cultural problems extend far beyond that. It shouldn't need saying but Japanese culture is also extremely sexist and literally patriarchic in ways that should be obvious even to those claiming "Western culture" (which as a European is a ridiculous notion given the vast differences in attitude across the continent - or even within individual countries - alone) isn't at all.
On the one hand you have overblown expectations of success and commitment to work for men, on the other you have an expectation of submissiveness, docility and youthful purity for women, but in reality most men can't be high earners, most women need to work the same grueling hours to make a living and it all just ends up making everyone unhappy and lonely because nobody can live up to the expectations both instilled in them from a young age and placed on them by their peers and failure is not an option. Not to mention that the concept of dedication to your employer has become completely detached from the previously implied reward of the company's loyalty to their lifelong committed workers, too.
The situation in "the West" (let's say the US) is comparable in some ways, certainly, but the gendered expectations are much less intense and there are at least some options to socialize outside the work environment and as bad as labor protections are, people don't literally die at work.
"many of those who participate were formerly part of the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements. [...] What makes TPOT a "post-rational" community is an interest in topics that are not traditionally rationalist, such as spirituality, occultism and conspiracy theories."
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.
I can see someone planning meticulously the murder, the immediate fleeing thereafter but not the rest. If I remember images, he wasn't wearing gloves so he may have had to clean it before he planned to get rid of it. Plus he may have hit hiccups in the process that may have derailed part of his plans. The fact he had cash both in local and foreign money probably means he had planned to move out of the country but was kind of waiting for the dust to settle.
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.
> I have a different take. Assuming his crime is driven by his beliefs/mission, not being found will not further it.
I'm not so sure in this case. It would have been hard for the perpetrator to predict beforehand, but there was so little public sympathy for the victim, and there are lot of people who said they would not help the police catch him. Him getting away would have shown that insurance companies are so terrible and so hated that the public is OK with the murder of those responsible (because if they weren't, they'd help the police and he'd be caught).
Escape would have sent a much stronger message than whatever he could hope to accomplish by grandstanding in a courtroom.
> Him getting away would have shown that insurance companies are so terrible and so hated that the public is OK with the murder of those responsible
That is already proven to a large extent. Sure police are doing their job because of the pressure they have and someone working at McDonald's wants to collect tens of thousands of dollars, but it is pretty clear that he has significant public support based on the outpouring of support in the recent days.
> Escape would have sent a much stronger message
No, escape would have just shown that he is good at hiding. Effectively giving himself up gave an even bigger stage for him to place his point. And he got a lot more coverage by delaying that instead of immediate surrender.
> than whatever he could hope to accomplish by grandstanding in a courtroom.
What is grandstanding for you could be advocacy for another. Only time can tell whether it accomplishes anything.
"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 sometimes asked about whether you'd follow the evidence - people aren't excluded (at least by the judge) for just knowing what the concept is.
As for "lying" here, it's an interesting metaphysical question. Because you're not lying (or telling the truth) about some observable event, it's simply your own state of mind. If somebody asks "Why did you vote not guilty", you simply say "I didn't believe the evidence was convincing". There is literally no way for anyone else to say otherwise.
> If somebody asks "Why did you vote not guilty", you simply say "I didn't believe the evidence was convincing". There is literally no way for anyone else to say otherwise
Nullification needs to be unanimous. You'd get in trouble when pitching nullification to your fellow jurors. (Or at the very least, have a mistrial declared.)
> people aren't excluded (at least by the judge) for just knowing what the concept is
If you want a surefire way to get off a jury, mention nullification in voir dire. (Hell, just ask innocently about it.)
Nullification absolutely does not need to be unanimous, and it rarely is. All it takes is one juror force a mistrial (and another if it is retried, etc.) Sure, the prosecutor would likely retry, but again, it just takes one juror out of twelve to cause a mistrial, and the vast majority of prosecutors don't prosecute indefinitely.
> If you want a surefire way to get off a jury, mention nullification in voir dire.
of course the case would be retried, but if after the first mistrial there is a widespread partying in the streets, and then the second mistrial the same, and then the third trial starts there is rioting, the way the system currently works they might decide not to try a fourth trial. Of course I don't know if the U.S is there yet.
I do. The educated, well-to-do, urban bubble has convinced itself—again—that this guy is universally adored. Because we’re mistaking—again—the difference between a symbol and the object, a mistake amplified by those who get their world view primarily from Twitter, Reddit, et cetera.
In the one case I sat on the jury for the judge told us that we had to follow their directions exactly as to how to interpret the law when making a sentence. We were informed we not allowed to choose a lighter charge (options were misdemeanor assault, assault and aggravated assault).
Jury nullification wouldn't have mattered and it was settled in an hour, but it was interesting. But I had been warned by multiple lawyer friends this might happen.
Even more wasteful as this was the 3rd strike so the difference between assault and aggravated was 25 or 26 years, aka no difference. And the defendant had pleaded down already. Finally it was obvious it wasn't aggravated for several reasons and the prosecution was just fishing for convictions. Basically took 2 extra days of everyone's time fishing for sentence elevations.
The jury ended up giving them assault, not aggrivated. Aggrivated required pre-mediatation. But the guy was drunk and did something dumb and quick. It wasn't pre-meditated. The judge was essentially telling us it had to be aggrivated, but also quoted the law. The jury voted for non-aggrivated. But it was 3 strikes so he got the same sentence (the full boat) no matter if he was aggrivated or non-aggrivated.
how do I know this? the defense attorney and the prosecutor both went to bars in my neighborhood. I got both of them drinks and asked them for the back story on the case.
> Most people don't even know what jury nullification is, and even fewer realize it is in fact legal. I'd be surprised if he was banking on that.
Also, IIRC, the court system is pretty against it. The judge won't instruct the jury on it and I very much doubt he'd let the defense attorney bring it up to the jury either.
Courts can be against it all they want, it is still legal and well within a juror's rights. I'd never expect a judge or attorney to raise it as an option, but at the end of the day it is.
Jury selection throws a wrench in the system, lawyers have a chance to ask questions under oath and get rid of jurors for most any reason. As i understand it, its pretty common for them to try to ferret out anyone that may go the nullification route.
I don't unfortunately, that would be buried somewhere in federal codes.
Orders and instructions are different though. An official order by a judge may fall under contempt of court if you don't comply. Instructions are more procedural and about a judge running the process of the trial. For deliberation, that also generally means instructions that really just help guide a jury of people who may not have done it before and aren't sure of the process or general expectations.
A juror can't be punished for their decision, ever. It doesn't matter whether a juror keeps their reasoning a secret or not.
Its interesting you meant that rhetorically, your premise is wrong in my opinion. If you want to distinguish between an instruction and an order I'd think it has to be based on how it can be enforced. An instruction can't be enforced by a judge, for example they can instruct you to only consider what was presented but they can't punish you if you disobey that.
Perhaps the jurisdiction where you practice is different than the ones I do? In federal court, and the states I'm familiar with, the judge certainly can punish you for disobeying instructions. You take an oath, and the judge orders you, to follow the instructions.
In the situation of jury nullification, though, the judge would have to be punishing a juror for the verdict they supported. That isn't legal at least in the US, a juror can't be instructed to give a certain verdict or punished based on their decision.
Judges will be careful not to directly give instructions against nullification for precisely that reason. They may very well imply that you shouldn't go off the rails of evidence provided or laws and precedent as described, but that's as far as a judge can go with instructions against nullification.
The judge, prosecution and defense get to vet each juror by asking them about their beliefs and biases. They can reject jurors if they believe the juror is unable to hear a case without being impartial. Jurors (often) won't be told the details of the case they'll be hearing while they're being vetted, only the basic details (e.g. defendant is a white male accused of murdering another white male).
In extremely high profile cases like the ones featuring Donald Trump, courts focus on selecting jurors who can remain fair and impartial despite their knowledge of the case or their own personal opinions. They'll go through extensive vetting which can include written questionnaires, interviews, oral questioning about their media consumption, their political beliefs and potential biases, and so on.
Judges generally hate it but there's also nothing they can do about it if it happens.
That said its a very far leap to assume (either as the suspect or as a third party) that because this suspect has a lot of online sympathy that that will translate to a jury both willing and knowledgeable enough to nullify. Certainly wouldn't bet my life or freedom on that myself.
Personally I lean toward doubting that getting caught was part of some master plan. People have this binary view of things where he's either got to be a criminal mastermind who thought of everything or a complete fool, and the reality is probably that he's a better than average premeditated murderer (given all of what is stacked against him) who still got caught due to a combination of bad luck and being a little bit careless. Considering how extensive the current surveillance state is he got closer to getting away with it than the vast majority of people would have, but also combined that with some stupid but perfectly naturally human oversights.
Or maybe he’s just not that smart… it’s pretty much expected some number will lose their marbles and become semi-deranged or fully deranged every year.
I’d guess at least 1 in ten thousand per annum. Which would equate to hundreds of newly deranged developers per year in the US.
Version 2.0 of this crime will feature the shooter having the forethought to have put a bitcoin wallet address on the front of his mask as he traipsed around in front of the cameras.
In the movie "Wag the Dog", Dustin Hoffman plays a Hollywood producer who is hired by the President to create a fake war to take attention away from another scandal. Spoiler alert Near the end, Hoffman's character is upset that the President's re-election is credited to something else instead of his handiwork. Even when told he's risking his life if he says anything, he yells "I want the credit!". I think a similar psychology may be at work in this and other crimes that become (in)famous.
I _think_ what you're getting at is saying the suspect wants the credit, in response to the parent saying the next one will be better at evasion by learning from his mistakes, right? And implying the next one might not want to evade either? I have no speculation here just looking for clarification on the movie reference.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. Obviously anybody who goes to the trouble of penning a manifesto is a hero/protagonist in their own narrative. When they see that their acts have captured the attention or even admiration of a significant portion of the public, the urge to stand up and say "I'm the one who did this great deed, and here's why" will often overpower the instinct for self preservation.
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.
Probably hadn't really thought through the specifics of tossing evidence.
Bodies of water are popular for disposing of things, because it's a huge PITA to find things there. Imagine how hard it might be in a large local pond, and then multiply that in complexity for a rather big river. Or an inland sea like the Great Lakes. Don't even multiply for those; it's a stupidly big irrelevant number.
It's been several days, he had plenty of time to wipe stuff down and dump it. I don't think this is arrogance necessarily, perhaps isolation and paranoia.
> I doubt he was arrogant. I think he was on the run and didn’t have any place to put away the evidence. Probably homeless this whole time. And had to go to get food at some point.
He totally did. Find a trash can, and put it in (though maybe disassemble the gun first, and dispose of it in pieces in multiple locations).
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!
It doesn’t matter what the brass say when giving orders. If the officer says the magic words during debriefing (after the shooting), he gets off scott free.
What are the magic words? I don’t know them, but I know that the lawyers who work for police unions know them and the trainers who train police officers drill those into the heads of officers.
The core problem with the jurisprudence: if a reasonable officer had a fear for themself or for members of the public, then fatal shootings in the line of duty are usually justified. The objective facts at the scene don’t matter; only the officer’s perception. If only all citizens were given the same rights…
Did you not understand my post, or do you not believe my claim?
The objective facts (as established by a body cam) matter very little, only a good faith belief that “I feared for my life or the life of someone in the public”.
Why? The burden of proof is “Innocent until proven guilty” and like I said, the onus is on the prosecution to prove that the officer’s statement that “they feared for their life” was a lie at the time of the incident. That’s extremely difficult to prove, especially when an officer has been on the job for a while and has been conditioned to use the right words to CYA.
A lot of people who commit crimes are suffering from a range of untreated mental illnesses. They are not always firing on all cylinders all of the time, leading to weirdness like this.
Most folks with mental illnesses live among us, not in mental institutions. If on a scale 1-10 you have something like bipolar on 1 or 2, you can sort of function with some meds. Sort of, until SHTF and emotions go haywire. Keeping relationships is hard, be it personal or professional, so folks struggle but from outside they often just appear 'weird'.
Wife is a GP doctor, maybe 1/3rd of her patients have some form of this.
100% this. I've seen stats saying 20% of people in jail have untreated mental illness. I've spent a lot of time in jails and I would say it has be 80%+ because a lot of people can function enough to live in society and hide their symptoms until the point where they do something criminal.
This sounds ridiculous, given his family background, from which running out of money seems unlikely, but it’s actually plausible. I know a lot of people who came from wealth but who insisted on fighting their own battles. I personally wouldn’t recommend it, though.
Also (I'm hoping) the trauma of taking another person's life must be hugely upsetting. I'm hoping it's not something you do lightly, and is not without personal consequences (guilt,shame, shock,.. dunno).
Do they record names of guests? It would take two seconds to ask the NJ DMV if someone by that name exists. If they don't, then the ID was probably fake. If there is someone by that name, showing the real ID photos to the hostel receptionist would quickly clear up whether the ID is fake or not. The receptionist flirted with him and got him to show his face so there's a good chance she'd be able to look at some photos and say whether any of them look like the guy.
>Last time I was there they wouldn't even record NJ.
>They recorded name on reservation and maybe DOB.
I'm sure the cops can run the same name/DOB combination through the databases of all 50 states + DC, and rule out any that don't match the surveillance footage.
“I was informed... that defendant presented a forged New Jersey Driver’s License with the name of Mark Rosario as his identification, which based on the number on it was the same identification defendant presented at the hostel,"
So the hostel saved at least the number.
This was not the case at least 2 years ago. I'm absolutely certain.
If 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.
You might know about their public appearances such as for shareholder meetings but how would you know which hotel they're staying at and that they would leave said hotel at 6:45 AM(!) and walk(!!) to the meeting venue?
Either massive luck on the shooter's side or there is a source of information that hasn't been discovered yet.
If 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.
Is having bugs in your code proof that you're not smart, or is it more likely momentary carelessness or even just that humans always have a non-zero error rate?
Less than 50% of murders are solved these days[1]. If he hadn't been carrying around all of the evidence and was more careful with the mask he very well may have gotten away with it, the NYPD had no clue who or where he was
No, but most murders aren't done by complete strangers who live far from the crime scene either. When they are, and they are careful, they are extremely hard to catch
He was presumably en route somewhere. Disposing of a fake ID such that forensics can’t get anything useful off it isn’t easily done on the run / incognito. (And if his inspiration is the Unabomber, he presumably had more targets.)
Surely you recognize that all you need to do is to rub it on some concrete for a couple of minutes to completely destroy it right? Not to mention if you owned a pair of scissors or a lighter or something…
> you recognize that all you need to do is to rub it on some concrete for a couple of minutes to completely destroy it right
You're going to take time away from your actual escape to make yourself less incriminating in case you are caught? Should he have been grinding up IDs at the Greyhound bus terminal in New York? Right after the whole city heard about the shooting? Or should he have waited until after the FBI plastered the nation with his face?
> if you owned a pair of scissors or a lighter or something
Scissors won't take care of fingerprints, let alone DNA. As for the lighter, again, where do you propose he do this without attracting attention?
Actually, I could see him having thought this would be easy to do, maybe even packing a lighter and scissors, only to realise in execution that you can't start burning IDs on a bus without someone noticing.
> Police don’t go around fingerprinting random pieces of plastic
No. But you don't know how far behind they are when you dispose of it. It only becomes random plastic after they've lost your trail.
> can just deface it in any way and throw it out the window on a highway or into any trash can
Sure. Or you can keep it until it can be safely disposed of. Which carries fewer risks? We don't even have to hypothesise, we know for a fact that the IDs on his person didn't cause him to get caught. We also know him not having the IDs on him wouldn't have caused him to be less caught.
I would think that getting rid of the evidence is the integral part of planning a crime. Otherwise it is sloppiness. There is a lot of ways to do such things I am sure, but you have to thought it through before. He didn't or the adrenaline was too much for him.
I think this might actually be it - he may have been motivated in some part by fame (but planned to be anonymous and get away with it) and after the hugely positive online response decided to purposely get caught.
I'm real interested in how a trial goes. Can you even find enough people in America who haven't been bent over by insurance to form an unbiased jury? I find it hard to imagine any jury would convict him.
I generally agree but think it’ll depend on how sympathetic his case is and what defense he tries. I believe New York juries have to reach a unanimous decision and if he had one of those insurance horror stories it wouldn’t be unheard of for at least one juror to feel sympathetic to, say, a provocation defense and only find him guilty of lesser charges.
Yes, as I said the mostly likely outcome is guilty but it wouldn’t shock me if, say, he wasn’t convicted on every charge. Juries introduce a human element and the response to this murder illustrates how many people really hate insurance companies. Something over 10% of Americans say they know someone who died due to denied care, which is a big enough number that I wouldn’t rule anything out.
There are other stats in play, too. For example, 30% of Americans know a murder victim. 50% have dealt with gun violence. The jury system narrows down to people who can focus on the law and follow the judge’s instructions. The pool of potential jurors is huge. It’s been rare that a trial has changed counties in any state because too many people in a county have strong feelings about the victim or perpetrator. I could see lesser murder charged being brought to keep motivation out of the trial, though. And yes, rule nothing out (in any trial.)
Agreed yet he'll serve some time like Gypsy Rose. A seemingly good hearted victimized murderer who story seems to work out well for her in the end in. She orchestrated killing her mom vs. just running away. If she's smart enough to get her mom killed indirectly using a lonely dude she's smart enough to run away. Murderer who is free with fame. Luigi is now the same yet is this murderer more liked then Gypsy Rose?
I'm not sure that is even necessary. I know enough people impacted by such things I'm not sure I wouldn't nullify even though I haven't been impacted myself. I don't think they can find 12 people who don't know someone with a bad story.
Isn't that a reverse conflict of interest? That way you are deliberately selecting people that are more/less sympathetic than a baseline of the US population.
It's not as if "he was mistreated by an insurer" is a defence, is it? That should be entirely irrelevant to the jury's finding, although sentencing might take it into account. The jury just needs to decide if he did it, so not having been mistreated by an insurer shouldn't preclude someone from making that decision.
'Shouldn't' is true. But the prosecution does not need to explain why they reject a potential juror by 'preemptive challenge'. Why would they take the chance?
Similarly, a defendant's race is not relevant to their guilt, but you're not going to pick a self-declared racist if you don't have to.
I keep seeing this take, and it seems pretty bizarre to me. Most Americans rate their health insurance as excellent or good [1], and even of the ones that don't, most probably don't support murdering health insurance executives on the street.
They won't have trouble seating a jury, and he'll be convicted of 1st degree homicide and spend the rest of his adult life in prison.
I think the problem is with outliers. Most people don’t have problems with thier health insurance because they don’t interact with it much or just have routine care.
But if you’re unlucky, it can ruin your life or the life of a loved one. It’s not hard to find horror stories - some recent viral ones came from LinkedIn comments to the CEO (written before his murder)
How so? All he had to do was continue to fly under the radar for a few more weeks until everyone forgot about it. Being on the lam implies they knew his identity; they did not.
> All he had to do was continue to fly under the radar for a few more weeks until everyone forgot about it.
That is seriously underestimating the attention span of law enforcement. I’m not saying that they would have caught him for sure, but they have motivation and means to keep looking far longer than a few weeks.
> Being on the lam implies they knew his identity; they did not.
At the minimum they had a picture of his face. That stuff will stay in databases indefinietly and face recognition is only getting better. They might have had his DNA from objects he interacted with or things he discarded. They could have traced his burner phone to locations he previously frequented, or where he bought it from. They could have traced him via video surveilance further along his escape and tied him to a location or a car.
None of this is guaranteed to work. There is a certain amount of luck involved. But just because after a few days they didn’t know who he is, doesn’t mean they could not have found him months or years down the road.
Another way to think of it would be, how much would it cost for a very rich family or person to hire few people to hunt you for the following 10 years.
He stalked his prey and killed it. That's hunting. Then law enforcement tracked him and trapped him. Also hunting! But none of the rich family has done any hunting (yet). So far they are the hunted.
I'm not. Hunting people in a safe democratic society isn't "romantic", it's not "The Most Dangerous Game" or anything else. Your analogy is absolutely accurate. Harvesting an oyster would be another. Still totally hunting (or maybe just gathering).
> the rest of their lives
Only if any of their adversaries survive with sufficient will to fight.
I think based on examples I am seeing for what qualifies as a bon mot, it would be different, but since you specified "attempt" in parentheses I guess it could qualify as some sort of attempt.
The thing is I don't think it is a genuine attempt. Is more like an intentionally counterfeit bon mot. It doesn't actually engage with the parent sentiment, but might fool people that are only half reading.
It was indirect, and people always see themselves as the good guy. It's easy to justify in your mind. "I'm saving shareholders money." "Most doctors over service patients, so they are the bad guys." "They would have died anyway," etc.
I would bet a lot of the healthcare CEO's are totally surprised that anyone would want to harm them.
I feel like a lot of doctors and nurses wouldn’t be doctors or nurses without the decent profit they earn.
I certainly wouldn’t work evenings, nights, weekends, and holidays, not to mention sacrifice my life during my 20s. And be around gross stuff and sad people.
And especially not when you can earn a comparable profit working behind keyboard.
That's... not what I meant. It is one thing to earn (very) good wages and entirely another thing to optimise the whole healthcare for profit. Healthcare is, by definition, a cost center. If you wanted to align incentives (a bit better) you would be paying for it only when you are not ill, not when you are. A decent compromise is what most countries do, which is that citizens pay a fixed sum for health insurance which covers most of the basic expenses. However the incentives are never completely aligned - someone profits from people being ill.
I don’t understand what this means. A group of doctors get together and open a business offering their services, and they distribute profits into their bank accounts. Or a dentist, or an optometrist, or a podiatrist.
Why would 99% of people do this work if they cannot profit?
> A decent compromise is what most countries do, which is that citizens pay a fixed sum for health insurance which covers most of the basic expenses.
That is just health insurance with $0 deductible/copays. Some US employers do offer this, and some even pay 100% of the premiums.
But these plans don’t sell well to the broader public, because most people would prefer (or can only afford) a lower premium and accept the volatility of having to spend a few hundred or a few thousand before insurance kicks in.
In some (many?) countries the options for private healthcare are limited (by design) and public healthcare takes care of people. Not in USA though. :) It has its pros and cons, but to be honest, neither system works very well. I would pick a public one anytime, but maybe it's just because I know it.
> Why would 99% of people do this work if they cannot profit?
They do profit, and should - they get a paycheck for their work.
If I nonjudgmentally assumed you speak from personal experience, doesn't it also depend on the person, their sensitivity, vulnerabilities etc.?
I have a 3.5 year old toddler and it sure feels hard on my soul right now (he just behaved the worst he's ever behaved in daycare today, to the point that they had to isolate him... and this is me dealing with it after only 3 hours of sleep, since he also keeps waking up every night ever since he turned 3... "sleep regression" should be called "slow parricide via toddler non-sleep")
Please consider reading this book. It changed my life:
Wahlgren, Anna (2009). A Good Night's Sleep - This is how you can truly help your baby to sleep through the night. Anna Wahlgren AB. ISBN 9789197773614
I'm saying this as a father who was going through the worst time of my life as my baby daughter's top 3 records for "most sleep in one night" was 5 hours (which only happened that one time), 3 hours (which only happened that one other time), and then never ever more than 2 sleep cycles of 45 minutes on any day/night.
Sleep deprivation makes your life so miserable. And it does so for the toddler as well. My daughter couldn't learn to walk and kept falling over because, well, she was just too exhausted.
It seems the book isn't as well known in the US (where I'm assuming you are) as it is in Europe, and maybe there are equivalent approaches from American authors as well. But this is the one that solved the problem and taught her to sleep in 4 - four - nights.
My wife and I applied the stuff from the book from Dec.1st to Dec.4th of 2018. My daughter has not had trouble sleeping her 11+ hours straight a single night since then (that was 6 years ago) except a couple of times when she was teething.
I was recently asked on a (business) podcast what was the top book that changed my life and that was it. To think you could struggle for such a long time, and suddenly find out you could change that in 4 days... I have tears in my eyes whenever I talk about it.
Anyway. Long message to wish you well, internet stranger. It will get better.
I've found that trying to describe the strategies in a few words usually gets the other person to think "oh, it can't be that simple" and then not actually try it.
Just like, trying to describe the lifestyle changes that got you in shape (which are always going to be the same 4-5 basic things), is less helpful than telling someone "go to the same coach/book I went to, and give it a try".
But in a nutshell, the book teaches a few simple principles of why kids wake up/cry and how what we (as parents) typically do to console the child actually sends the message that "sleeping in this bed is not safe".
Once you get that, it gives you a 4-day (and 4-nights) routine to follow to get the baby/toddler/infant/child to re-learn that this is a safe place, your parents are around, you can go back to sleep. Doing the full 4 days is a two-person job (my wife and I rented a room at the hotel next door and took turns with one of us sleeping there while the other was with our daughter at home).
We followed everything to the letter ; the first couple of days is timed very precisely and you take notes in a journal as you go, which is how I can tell you that we were already tearing up when our daughter slept in 3-hour chunks the 2nd night, did an almost 8-hour streak on night 3 and pulled a full 11-hour night on night 4.
I'll tell you, the least important part of the whole thing is a short lullaby we came up with as we were going to the 4 days, and I still sing that to my daughter 6 years later as I leave her for the night, as this has become a bit of a talisman for me :-) Definitely not needed anymore but I'll probably sing her this song until she leaves for college or tells me to shut up!
> he just behaved the worst he's ever behaved in daycare today
I'm sorry, maybe it's not my place, but... Please listen to him. Children are not stupid, they just lack experience. If he behaves some way then there is a reason for it. The usual suspect is lack of attention (which is very important for a child), since they get more of it (even if in form of punishment) for behaving "badly"... The outcome is predictable.
I found that treating them as adults when it comes to respecting their wishes goes a long way towards raising a good person.
Again, sorry for an unsolicited advice from a random person on the internet. Especially as it sounds like life is very stressful for you right now. Fingers crossed everything gets better soon.
We already do that, but maybe even more is necessary. The problem is that I'm 52 and already had sleep apnea/CPAP, she is 49, and my son is 3. Every day is an exhausting marathon.
I understand, and I know that for each person the circumstances are different. I hope you are both able to find the strength to just - be with him. I wish you all the best!
They know what his face looks like and had a bunch of information about his whereabouts prior to visiting the city. It was only a matter of time until they found him. His one bet might have been to cross the border in Mexico.
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.
The “easy” solution is to try and remove profit as much as possible from the equation. Pretty much every other high GDP country in the world has single payer healthcare.
Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
Two people I know who moved to the US from countries with single payer healthcare said that in their previous countries they would have to wait a long time for certain operations, but in the US can get them almost immediately.
Depends on criticality. Yes, the US beats Canada for example on wait time in a lot of cases, however, as a Canadian I can walk into a ER and not have a co-pay.
I had my appendix out a few years ago, I walked into the ER at 2PM, had the surgery done by midnight, and was able to be discharged by 9AM the next day. The only cost was my parking, because I drove myself over. Meanwhile, I've also had friends in the US who were clearly quite ill, and made the conscious decision to not go to the ER because it would have cost them hundreds of dollars.
It's all a balance, but I'm happier with my single pay system, because for the most part, health decisions aren't at the whim of my bank balance being too low. I personally wouldn't be as disappointed in the US system, if the reason someone can get a surgery immediately didn't balance out with something like UnitedHealthcare's 32% rejection rate, because someone wanted a $10MM / yr salary or a $40MM yacht.
The US has a law that 80% or 85% of premiums needs to go to healthcare. So if an insurance company is already up against the limit, increasing the rejection rate will actually decrease salaries and yachts (because less money will be spent on healthcare, thus premiums need to be reduced, and the 20% available for employee salary becomes smaller).
Although, if increasing the rejection rate allows the insurance company to decrease individual premiums, which causes a lot more people to sign up for coverage due to low cost, that could increase total premium income, total spent on healthcare, and salaries.
From what I understand, wait time can certainly be an issue with single payer healthcare. However, there's people in the US who have effectively infinite wait time because they can't afford treatment at all.
I have an excellent insurance plan and ready access to a large US hospital system. The wait to see a dermatologist as a new patient is ~6 months. Definitely not unique to single-payer systems.
Also, this wait times in many part of the US are in line with the single payer countries. The quality of care in the US is heavily dependent on location.
Some problems in those countries are also caused by for profit healthcare existing in America. The shortage of doctors in Canada is not helped by the appeal of making much more money down south.
Not to mention Canadian expats are generally the ones who would be able to afford the American healthcare costs.
Also sounds like Canada isn't paying their doctors enough, which isn't to say America's healthcare is better, but it is something to take into account.
Canadian doctors are extremely well paid by Canadian and international standards, just not by the standards of American doctors (who have to repay massive medical debt). Increasing their wages is not really feasible, outside of a few underpaid specialties.
Dutch and Swiss healthcare systems are entirely private (more so than in the US since there are no Medicare or Medicaid equivalents) yet they are highly regulated and profits are limited.
Why can’t the US just copy paste them? It’s not like single payer is the only option..
> Dutch and Swiss healthcare systems are entirely private (more so than in the US since there are no Medicare or Medicaid equivalents)
and Swiss doctors are paid very well compared to let say German ones. There is long waiting list of German doctors that would like to practice in Switzerland.
Waiting time increases with accessibility and aging population. Most developed countries with universal healthcare amd the hospitals are full with elderly. The developing countries are often much better due to younger population. Places like Turkey are incredibly accessible and cheap compared to the develped countries.
When you remove profit from the equation, you also remove the incentive to increase supply. That's fundamentally what profit is: a reward for fulfilling the needs of consumers. If you can fulfill those needs better or more efficiently or at a larger scale than your competitors, you get more profit.
>>Would you go to work without being paid? I wouldn't.
Do you think doctors and nurses work for free in countries with socialized healthcare?
They do get paid. A lot if you're a specialist too - it's a very lucrative field to be in. Admittedly, not for everyone - nurses and junior doctors usually don't get paid very well, but it's my understanding that in US it's not like these professions make bank either.
>>if there was a ton of people who wanted to found, fund, and work at nonprofit health insurance companies.
That's the whole point that Americans are missing - you don't need the insurance companies in the first place, if the entire system is owned by the public. You go to a hospital, you get an operation done and that's it, at no point is there anyone sitting there are processing your "claim" - if the operation is one allowed by the system(and it almost certainly is) then it's just done and the system pays for it from general taxation budget. No one negotiates rates with the hospital, argues about your excess or premiums or in or out of network coverage. Health insurance is something you get for travelling abroad, like if you have an accident while skiing and need a helicopter to get you out, not for visiting a doctor or a hospital.
Im responding to a comment that thinks the following is crazy and wrong.
>When you remove profit from the equation, you also remove the incentive to increase supply.
Yes, socialized system countries have doctors because they pay doctors, ensuring supply. This proves the point above.
If you pay people to do something, you get more of it.
Health insurance companies dont provide healthcare. They dont stich you up or manufacture pills. They are in the business of vetting and denying claims to ration healthcare provided by others.
>No one negotiates rates with the hospital, argues about your excess or premiums or in or out of network coverage. Health insurance is something you get for travelling abroad, like if you have an accident while skiing and need a helicopter to get you out, not for visiting a doctor or a hospital.
It works different in various socialized systems, but there is always someone negotiating with the hospital, the workers, and the manufacturers. Sometimes this is the government, sometimes it is private insurance.
I dont know which country you are talking about, but almost every country has some sort of Health Insurance. What differs is the level of involvement by the citizens in selecting it.
A classic example would be Germany, which is a multiple payer system with both government and private insurance. 85% percent of people have the government health insurance, which is paid by employers and employees and mandatory. the government manages and negotiates rates for this plan. You can opt out and get private insurance instead, and those insurers have sperate negotiations and offer different services. There is also supplemental insurance, also private, also negotiated separate.
From my understanding Germany is an outlier among countries with socialized healthcare because their system is either straight up reliant on insurance or is modelled after insurance-like systems. My experience is based on Poland and UK. And sure in the UK you pay for "national insurance" which partially funds the NHS, but the point is that it's almost irrelevant to your coverage - as long as you live in the UK legally you are entitled to treatment, whether you pay NI or not. Again, the difference(imho) is that if you go to a hospital and a doctor there decides you need an operation done, it only goes through a cursory check to make sure the operation is covered and then it's carried out. It doesn't go to some central office where someone checks if you as a person X are entitled to have this done or not, it's not a "claim" like a one you would make with an actual insurance company.
And yes, of course you can supplement that with private insurance if you wish, but vast majority of people don't.
And yes, of course the government negotiates with providers - but when you get treated that's not something that affects you. You don't get a bill that says "your treatment was £10k, but the goverment will only pay £5k, cough up the rest". In fact no one(patients) gets any bills ever.
I'm pretty sure that UK is the outlier, where healthcare providers are state employees. Wikipedia says the NHS is the largest employer in Europe with 1.4 million employees.
I think the vast majority of countries have some sort of a situation with the government as at least one of the payers, and Private health care providers.
I completely agree that the US is an outlier in how involved the patient is in the payment of their healthcare, and the fact that they can be left with the bill instead of the provider if the insurance is denied.
On a psychological level, I think people are more frustrated by being offered care that they can't afford and dealing with uncertain coverage then not being offered the care at all.
I'm a huge proponent of healthcare reform in the US. That's sad, I think one of the biggest problems with getting it past is unreal expectations. Americans have a caricature of European healthcare in their mind that is totally inaccurate.
It’s still an insurance system though, whether it’s publicly owned or privately. There are still bureaucrats who decide what is covered and what is not, and they make that decision for the entire population. Things like cutting edge cancer treatments (often developed in the US) are many years late arriving to public healthcare systems. And many expensive treatments are simply not covered, or covered as second or third line (eg. immune therapy), when patients in the US with appropriately good insurance receive them as first line with far better outcomes.
> No one negotiates rates with the hospital
No one negotiates period. Coverage decisions are made unilaterally by government officials, and services that those officials deem too expensive are simply not offered. The same issue exists with medical equipment. The wait time for an MRI is absurd in eg. Canada because government only funded so many machines. In the states there are simply more machines, because supply was more elastic, and more freely
able to meet demand.
Sure. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure American healthcare system can be amazing in certain cases, and like you said, in specific instances the "market demand" is able to solve issues that socialized systems struggle with. But the same is true in the opposite direction - plenty of stories of people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it. People who have their cancer treatment stopped because their employer changed the insurer and the new insurer has to do a full re-evaluation before they approve the treatment to continue, so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process. And so on and so on. We could both do this I'm sure.
>>when patients in the US with appropriately good insurance receive them as first line with far better outcomes.
The problem I have with that is basically you're saying the quality of the treatment depends on what insurance you have. In socialized healthcare everyone gets the same treatment.
And in fact this is reflected in the average quality of care received on average, with outcomes in US being much worse than elsewhere. US has mortality from "preventable causes" twice as bad as Australia, Japan or France(paragraph 5). So in US few people get amazing care better than anywhere else. And most people get worse care than anywhere else.
>>Things like cutting edge cancer treatments (often developed in the US) are many years late arriving to public healthcare systems.
Obviously it's hard to make a general statement on this because every country has varied policies around this. But to share an anecdote - my own dad was enrolled into an experimental programme at a leading oncology hospital in Poland because he had a very rare and ultra aggressive cancer which had no known treatment other than a brand new(then) Glivec, which wasn't even approved for that cancer yet, but he had the whole course of his treatment fully funded under our socialized healthcare. In those very very rare cases where regular treatment is not available there are avenues to explore experimental treatments, and they then serve to direct general treatment plans for the rest of the population. Again, this is a specific example from one country.
You would concede that, as a consequence of imposing involuntary obligations on their citizens, socialized systems are less free? And you would also concede that reasonable people can disagree about the priorities of their values, and that valuing personal autonomy over collective well-being is a reasonable position?
> people being denied lifesaving care because insurance companies decide it's not worth it
You get what you sign up for. Like in any business transaction, doing your due diligence and understanding the details of both parties obligation is table stakes. We also have courts precisely for cases when such disputes become intractable.
> so in the meantime you get no cancer drugs for months while they do their process.
No one is stopping you from paying for the drugs yourself. Insurance will reimburse you once they validate your claim. Bureaucracy takes time.
> the average quality of care received on average
And the quality of care on the upper end is markedly worse in many ways. Wealthy people from all over the world travel to the US for their medical procedures for a reason. You're effectively arguing that net-contributors to society (people who pay a lot of taxes) should accept an increase in their tax burden for the privilege of a degradation in their personal access to and quality of care, in order to bring up the average. I hope you appreciate just how directly this opposes the interests of this class.
> From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
You can't have a system like this in a free country. I want the freedom to associate (in an insurance pool) alongside other people with a similar risk profile to myself (eg. no drinking/drugs/smoking, daily exercise, good sleep, healthy body composition) to the exclusion of others. I want my insurance company to carefully scrutinize its applicants and claimants, on my behalf, to ensure that my interests are being well-represented. Insurance does not mean absolution from personal responsibility.
The government still negotiates. Refusing to buy a product/service at X rate is a negotiation, and there is a back and forth with providers/manufacturers.
Same for state employed healthcare professionals, which have salary set by the state.
What other incentive is there? There might be some willing to go deep into debt in medical school so they can work for free out of the goodness of their hearts, but that's a vanishingly small number of people.
And yet apparently countries all over the world have to artificially raise the bar for med school because so many people want to be doctors for incentives aside from just the money.
People don't go bankrupt at anywhere near the rate Americans do for medical reasons. People don't constantly bring up dealing with insurance as the #1 burden during medical procedures.
> Pretty much every other high GDP country in the world has single payer healthcare.
This is just completely not true. Take France and Germany for example.
> Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
So anesthesiologists should be able to ask for any amount their heart desires and the insurance is the bad guy if they don’t want to pay it? Anesthesiologists have a profit motive too, you know.
> All French citizens are required to have health insurance, and there are three main health insurance funds. The funds are non-profit and negotiate with the state on healthcare funding.
> Does Germany have free public healthcare? Yes, all Germans and legal residents of Germany are entitled to free “medically necessary” public healthcare, which is funded by social security contributions. However, citizens must still have either state or private health insurance, covering at least hospital and outpatient medical treatment and pregnancy.
Neither of those are single-payer systems, which you can see by the fact that both of your quotations involve multiple payers. Google "does france have single payer healthcare" or "does germany have single payer healthcare" for more info
Naturally they would not wake you up mid-procedure for payment, nor ask you for payment later. What anthem wanted to do was put a cap on the number of billable hours per procedure, and have anesthesiologists accept payment based on that cap as "payment in full", meaning they would not expect additional payment for the extra time they spent after a procedure went long, either from the patient or the insurerer. This would have resulted in anesthesiologists making less money (as well as having less opportunity for fraud), which is why they didn't like it.
But it was presented in popular media as if the insurance company was trying to shift the cost of overlong procedures onto the patient, rather than onto the anesthesiologists. Thankfully there was a public outcry and the anesthesiologists won, well-deservedly so considering they must be barely scraping by on a median income of $470,000/year.
> What anthem wanted to do was put a cap on the number of billable hours per procedure, and have anesthesiologists accept payment based on that cap as "payment in full", meaning they would not expect additional payment for the extra time they spent after a procedure went long, either from the patient or the insurerer.
The policy even had a path for the anesthesiologist to justify the overrun so that portion could be covered too. No doubt Anthem would scrutinize the justification closely and reject cases where they detect abuse, and the incentives are for Anthem to be too strict, but there was nothing wrong with the policy on its face. These sorts of things are absolutely necessary in order to drive healthcare costs, which are absolutely obscene, down.
And pretty much every one of those countries also has widely used private insurance because the public one most definitely has price caps, longer waits, and lesser service.
No system could afford to spend unlimited amounts for anyone wanting it. You get triaged since resources are not infinite.
Pick your favorite system, say the UK, and google UK healthcare rationing to find state policy on what limits people face.
Any medical system inevitably has limits of what they can spend per patient. Do you prefer the limit to be set and enforced by the government that is amenable to political process, or anonymous profit-seeking insurance company board members, like in the sibling comment case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42375998 ?
That comment was about a person on Medicare Advantage, which is extremely heavily regulated by Medicare, the epitome a of govt medically regulated cost per procedure system.
Here is the govt Medicare page about Medicare Advantage Plans, with references to all the pages of legislation and Medicare rules such plans must comply with.
For example, select “What should I know about Medicare Advantage Plans?”
It states, among other things, “ Medicare Advantage Plans provide all of your Part A (Hospital Insurance) and Part B (Medical Insurance) benefits (also called “Original Medicare”), including new benefits that come from laws or Medicare policy decisions”.
Note in particular Medicare advantage will provide any PT where Medicare would.
If you look at peer reviewed research, MA outperforms M in outcomes and satisfaction by a slight amount.
These are reasons why forming or reinforcing beliefs on anecdotes and not understanding the truth is a bad way to make claims.
So now that you see this outcome was medical care “set and enforced by the government” and not the outcome from “anonymous profit-seeking insurance company board members,” will you redirect your outrage?
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........
this right here. all the people in this thread acting like "everything is fine" and things aren't so bad for most people...i sincerely hope they get the reality check they deserve but not like this. to see a loved one - who did nothing wrong other than existing - to be murdered by the system? i've witnessed this first hand and to say one's blood boils is understatement of the century. all preventable but when profits are always always always always the most important thing...you're nothing but a cost; an expense to others' egregious profit motives. and as such....expendable.
I will freely admit, I didn't know shit about medicare advantage plans prior to this shit show happening. Most people don't have a clue. But if you talk to a social worker at a hospital, they see it every single day. They are beat down trying to fight for their patients while watching them get fucked by insurance.
What state are you in? You should be able to get PPO plans in the healthcare marketplace. Expect to pay considerably more a month of it isn’t subsidized
I'm not sure all of this is profit seeking caused given their small margins. It feels like it could be a down stream effect of business sustainability and competition. The bag is necessarily covered by those who have less long running health complications, and so you need to provide a competitive price to them so they pay in with you. The price offered when you don't need care becomes lower than the amount needed to cover everyone when you do. Which would incentive denials out of necessity as well.
Medicare Advantage is HMO right? I just switch my folks to BCBS PPO with Medicare and a “medigap” supplemental plan to cover things that Medicare won’t. My head is still spinning up to my neck in paperwork for the cancer and hemorrhagic stroke bills from out of network physician groups billing, truly 24/7 job. Sorry for your loss. You did a lot to help I can tell after going through this myself. Be kind to yourself. They denied my mom’s chemo drugs it’s absurd. She paid into the system for decades without incident.
I wonder if there is a niche to ameliorate this sort of thing by offering payday loans on insurance payouts.
The incentives are pro-social: insurance companies have an incentive to delay payouts, because their profits come from interest (they pay out more money than they take in) so the longer they can hold onto money the better. But that's reversed for this hypothetical loan issuer - they want to make the payout as fast as possible in order to earn as much interest as possible as quickly as possible.
And if there's a systematic tendency for medicaid advantage plans to deny claims that eventually get approved, and if you could predict which ones will get approved 'just' by really understanding what medicaid would approve, then this might be self-sustaining or even profitable?
The solution is disallow private insurance being the middle man between medicare and the patient.
What possible benefit to the patient is having a whole bureaucracy sit between the gov't insurance and the person in need of medical care? It only exists to make money off the backs of the people they are harming.
Now, if you don't know why people sign up for them, you don't understand what they are doing. My mom, like many others, was on a fixed income. If you sign up for a medicare advantage plan, they will do things like give you an extra $100 a month to you directly. Why would insurance be willing to PAY you? Because they make all their money billing medicare and denying you coverage.
18 billion in profits last year running a middle man between patients and medicare
Network effects. They outsource all the medical billing and management to the big insurance racket companies. Protip: go with a PPO Medicare plan and medigap supplemental plan if you want your loved ones to see any specialists and go to any hospital. I switched mine off the HMO advantage plans to BCBS PPO cause HMO Medicare advantage plans deny everything by default fighting tooth and nail.
Wikipedia says the government introduced intermediaries to cut costs (i.e. create a scapegoat people can blame for denying claims or reducing payments to providers and not have the finger point at the government).
> The act had a five-year savings goal and a ten-year savings goal following its enactment in 1997. The five-year savings goal was $116.4 billion which would be achieved by limiting growth rates in payments to hospitals and physicians under fee-for-service arrangements.[7]
>This plan also involved the change of the methods of payment made to rehabilitation hospitals, home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, and outpatient service agencies as well as the reduction of payments to Medicare managed care plans and the slowing of growth rates of these same care plans.[7]
>The ten-year savings goal was $393.8 billion using the same savings methods as the five-year goal to achieve the savings in 2007.[7]
Is it just me or does this sound like a terrible bill? I've gone through the page and it just sounds like it was trying to save money by making healthcare beneficiaries worse off.
I haven't researched how all these came to exist but I assume it is the typical conservative talking point about the free market being more efficient so why wouldn't we want this. It will save us all money. And no, I don't believe any of that BS.
Or, I don’t know, maybe we do what every other Western nation has done and just present a public option for healthcare coverage to the average person?
Nah, better to have millionaires lying to the sick and dying about the company not having the money to pay for the coverage that the sick person paid a hefty monthly premium to provide.
Nice, a hyper capitalistic solution to a problem which only exists because of a hyper capitalistic system. Why not add another middleman with a financial incentive to a system overburdened by middlemen with financial incentives?
The solution would be to remove useless leeches providing no value or benefit to anyone other than shareholders, not add more of them.
And what do you know, most of the rest of the developed world has managed to do that. And even the parts that have private healthcare have managed to put strict rules controlling it, and costs and outcomes are much better.
Yep, and it is preventable. The one thing I can say is NEVER let your parents sign up for a "medicare" advantage plan. There is no advantage. The company my mom was with is one of the largest and profited something like 18 BILLION off medicare last year. How do you think that is possible? Because they overcharge medicare and deny coverage.
People sign up for (or are tempted to sign up for) Medicare C because traditional Medicare is too complex and bafflingly bad. Traditional Medicare requires paying for your Part B premium, a separate Part D plan and premium (from the private insurance companies), likely a third “Medigap” plan and premium (also from the private insurance companies IIRC) and then separate private vision and dental coverages.
And for all of that, you’re stuck paying at least 20% of everything, on top of separate deductibles for each part and no out of pocket caps at all (meaning Medicare isn’t even an ACA compliant health care plan). Part C simplifies this for so many people by rolling all of Part B, Part D and usually vision and dental into a single premium and puts out of pocket caps on the amount of money you might need to shell out. Is it any wonder people keep choosing Part C even if it means their providers have to fight the insurance more?
Source? UNH’s entire net income in 2023 was $22.3B, and their market cap is more than 5x the next biggest managed care organization (MCO).
The other MCOs all had net income less than $8B (CVS/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/etc).
There is no way a business earned a profit of $18B just from Medicare and it not being visible on their net income figures.
That is not to say Medicare Advantage is good for most customers (the common advice is to stay away from it), but fantastical numbers don’t help arguments.
Profit is not income. That $18B could be spend on salaries, bonuses, company assests, etc, and I'm not an accountant but if it's getting spent on the business it doesn't have to be included in their income reports.
Profit without a qualifier is assumed to mean net income, which is all revenue minus all expenses.
But even supposing that the business earns $18B from Medicare Advantage after all is said and done, it doesn’t pass the smell test because at that level of profit, these businesses should shut everything else down and just do Medicare Advantage.
Wish I could upvote this more. Switched mine to BCBS PPO with medigap supplemental plan for their Medicare provider. They got to go to the best cancer hospital and specialists you can just call up the office and schedule. It costs like $900 a month though and they pay 20% with 80% plan coverage up to catastrophic out of pocket limit. PPO if you want to give your loved ones a fighting chance.
I'm genuinely amazed by the distribution of opinions in this thread.
If y'all feel that way, why don't you vote for a "socialist" healthcare system like we have over here in communist Europe?
I mean, I'm over here in Germany and I'm not going to claim the system is that great, but it's really not half bad either, and it does seem to prevent the most extreme tragedies.
It's on the ballot a lot; Obama wanted, but was ultimately unable to, implement a broad individual mandate within the ACA; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supported medicare for all.
A number of states have implemented individual mandates; including Massachusetts under Mitt Romney.
It seems quite clear that you'd get it if you (collectively) voted that way, or not for candidates who very actively oppose it.
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.
The "America, love it or leave it" tactic? It's intellectually dishonest and shortcuts any kind of debate or thoughtful discussion. Or is this more of the "you haven't left your wife beating husband so you must like it" tactic? That's also philosophically bereft and avoids anything substantive.
Suffice it to say, constructive criticism is vital for democratic improvement.
> If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave.
That's a weird conclusion. For me, it's rather "The USA has its flaws (for me - healthcare and higher education financing above all) so we as a society should focus on fixing these problems". Killing people or leaving the country are not solutions, they are are an equivalent of short Twitter replies on a nuanced subject.
Isn’t this how it is supposed to work in America? People own guns to fight tyranny. The gunman carried out his own judgment, but that’s the whole point. And there is reasonable belief that the CEO is responsible for a lot of suffering and expected life lost.
> Don't like it? GTFO out loser! Uproot your family, move away from everything you know, all your friends, and go take a chance in a completely different country. Just change everything about your life and stop trying to make anything ever better. Otherwise STFU about it!
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.
Me too. I’m describing it flippantly for effect, but I’m deadly serious. There are ways to kill people that get the attention of law enforcement, and ways to kill people that are de facto (and often de jure) legal. And wouldn’t you know, the latter category tends to include the methods used by the rich and powerful.
There's a barely-known Italian song from 2006 by Italian rapper Caparezza that deals with this exact theme. It's about a guy trying to "legally" kill his wife.
Or coming to temporary clarity? Things like the “culture wars” are distractions pushed by the elites to keep the lower classes fighting amongst themselves and not their true enemy. But extractive robber barons are the real problem behind everyone’s life getting worse all the time, and for a brief moment everyone has seen that and been in alignment.
If we have a functioning democracy, you know, where we vote for what we want, how do we end up with the healthcare situation in this country? (For god's sake I'm NOT inviting a right-vs-left debate here!) Nobody wants this, and yet we haven't solved it by any legislative actions. That tells you clearly there is an invisible 4th arm of government (not "shadow government", corporate government) going on here that we are just beginning to shed light on.
It’s not even subtle. The deciding vote which kept Obamacare from having a public option was Joe Lieberman, commonly referred to as “the Senator from Aetna.”
The country has been going crazy yelling about trans people and gay people and black people and Irish people and "Ingins" for hundreds of years. Suddenly we stop worrying about 7 trans athletes and pay actual attention to what's actually going on and you say we're going crazy? I say we, just for a few days, collectively woke from a delusional nightmare to see the world as it really is.
Don't worry. We're already drifting back to sleep.
Air pollution alone kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. More die from air pollution than die from what’s legally defined as murder, by a substantial margin. How many people are in prison for it? Most of that pollution it outright legal. The illegal parts are rarely punished and never on the level meted out to “murderers.” And that’s just one example.
It’s totally legal to deliberately kill innocent people, as long as you do it in certain ways.
You're using the word "deliberately" wrong when talking about things like air pollution. Pointing a gun and shooting at someone is quiet a different thing than is causing air pollution.
Are people who smoked next to other people deliberately killing them? After all, second hand smoke was quite dangerous.
Please explain the difference, in terms of how it should affect my opinion of the person who carries out the act. Pretend, for the sake of argument (and because it’s true) that I don’t see it.
A factory boss decides to release some toxic pollutant. They know that it will result in some number of deaths over the next years. They choose to go through with it anyway, because they make more profit than if they disposed of the stuff properly, and that money matters more to them than the lives they’re ending.
What’s the difference between that and some petty criminal shooting someone in the street so they can take the victim’s wallet?
And yeah, smoking counts too, why not? The saving grace there is that the harm from an individual smoker isn’t very large. Even over a period of years, someone who habitually smokes near people who don’t consent to it only takes a tiny fraction of a life. That’s why I think smoking bans should be enforced with reasonable fines rather than life in prison.
> Please explain the difference, in terms of how it should affect my opinion of the person who carries out the act.
Sure.
> A factory boss decides to release some toxic pollutant. They know that it will result in some number of deaths over the next years. They choose to go through with it anyway, because they make more profit than if they disposed of the stuff properly, and that money matters more to them than the lives they’re ending.
This depends a lot on context you haven't provided. Most importantly - is this legal?
If releasing this toxic pollutant is illegal, then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. For good reason, that is usually not a death sentence. But if you have an issue with how harsh or not the sentence is, that's a question to take up with the legal system, not with the individual.
Either way, vigilante justice is not needed.
If releasing this pollutant is legal, the question is different. Firstly, why is it legal? If it shouldn't be, then again - this is something to take up with the justice system. Sometimes it's legal for good reasons - it's not clear yet that it is truly toxic. That should definitely inform how we treat someone - releasing something that might be a pollutant is definitely different.
There's just a lot of nuance to this question, it's not an easy soundbite, because the real world is complicated.
> What’s the difference between that and some petty criminal shooting someone in the street so they can take the victim’s wallet?
Let me make a very important point here.
The legality of an action matters a lot more for society than the morality of an action. That's kind of the whole reason we have a legal system, and for good reason! And a pretty fundamental principle of the legal system is that intent matters a whole lot.
Here's some of the differences of the two cases:
- With a criminal shooting someone in the street to take their wallet, I am very scared that he will continue doing this - he will likely shoot more people to get their wallets, because he ignores the laws and morality.
As opposed to the factory boss, who (assuming this is legal), would presumably not do something if it were illegal. So I don't have to worry about his actions - he's not likely to "kill" anyone else if it's against the law.
- A criminal shooting someone is almost certainly trying to kill or at least harm them. The action is very direct. This matters a bunch, because we can be pretty certain of their intent, and therefore how they will act in the future.
As opposed to a factory boss - where the indirectness of the action is far more ambiguous. Did he really know that this would cause deaths? Are there mitigating circumstances (like him being pretty sure it's far enough that it won't cause deaths because it's small amounts, or far from populations)?
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The biggest problem with your examples is that there are really two options here. You either agree with the legal system - in which case, there's a perfect remedy for actions like releasing toxic chemicals, which is using the legal system to prosecute such people.
Or you don't agree with the legal system - you think some things should be illegal, but they aren't.
And this is what is secretly (or not so secretly) motivating most of the pro-vigilante comments. They think that what they consider to be moral is good enough to use to enact justice - they don't need to actually convince their fellow citizens, or convince their lawmakers, to enact their ideas into law. It's enough for them to fervently be sure they are right - that's supposedly a good enough reason to inflict their morality on other people using violence.
And that is a disgusting, anti-democratic worldview, that would leave society in tatters.
Society can't function if everyone can just decide that their morality is the ultimate justice. We have to come together as a society and agree on rules. Because as everyone understands - 99% of people do something that someone else considers wrong.
If our society functioned via "well I'm sure I'm right about what is moral, so I can execute people based on my morality", then pretty soon we'd have total anarchy.
Do you think abortion is murder? Go ahead and kill some doctors. Do you think creating weapons should be illegal? Go ahead and kill the CEO of a weapons manufacturer. Do you think protesting war is terrible because it puts "our soldiers" in danger? Go and shoot up people leading protests. Perhaps you think that climate change will kill us and anyone who works in the car industry is therefore tainted? Go and blow up some car factory workers.
I agree with some of the position above, disagree with some others, as I'm sure most people do. And that's fine! But decent people understand that disagreeing about things, even things that directly pertain to life and death - is not a good enough reason to start killing each other over. We all have to live together, so we all have to work together to agree on what is right or wrong, and to appoint people to collectively enact the will of society - not just have individual citizens run off and do what they want based on their ideas.
> This depends a lot on context you haven't provided. Most importantly - is this legal?
Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law. The entire point of the person you are replying to is that acts with moral equivalence are treated differently by the law because of the social and economic status of those likely to commit those acts.
A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for charges of simple possession as well as charges of possession with intent to distribute. Both are effectively the same drug, but one version of this drug is more commonly use by poor and non-white people, and the other version used by rich white people, and so we ended up with a gross disparity in the law over exactly morally equivalent acts.
You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.
> Whether it is legal or not is irrelevant. You are entering into a conversation about morality. The law does not dictate morality, as much as it can morality dictates the law.
There are various ideas about morality. But I think even in the most common-sense interpretation of morality, most people agree that there are things that are legal, but immoral, things that are perfectly moral but illegal, and that respecting the law is a meta-rule that is important regardless of morality.
Simple example: Most people agree that cheating on a spouse is wrong and immoral. Not illegal though. Do you think it makes any sense to suggest that the only options are either we change the law to make adultery criminal, or we take vigilante justice on adulterers? Or is it just possible that some things might be immoral (to some people) but should be legal?
> A very real example of this from American history is that crack cocaine and powder cocaine had different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines [...]
Yes, and I think the law was wrong in this case, like it's been wrong many times in history (slavery was once legal too). The correct thing to do was to try and change it, which is what eventually happened.
An incorrect option would've been to jailbreak prisoners because you disagree with the law, despite lots of people being imprisoned for longer than they should've been.
> You are not actually engaging with the argument that the person you are replying to is making. Nobody gives a shit what the law says, they care about what is right and what is wrong. Then we mold the law to match.
I am engaging, because I disagree with this idea. The law and morality are connected, but distinct things, as I've shown above. We have to have legal systems in place to make broad decisions - we can't go based off of people's personal moral ideas. Explain to me how you would like things to work and still be compatible with that idea, given the above examples I've given.
And I think the idea that "nobody gives a shit what the law says" is a statement that is... very, very incorrect.
The biggest question here is: what is the purpose of the law?
The standard answers are things like, the law exists to protect people, or enforce broadly agreed conduct, or to deter or punish criminals.
Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.
Civilization depends on people mostly not taking violent revenge when wronged. The law exists to replace revenge with “justice” in the minds of the aggrieved. Everything else is window dressing.
If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.
> If this starts to break down then the law is failing. The fix isn’t to convince people that following the law is inportant, the fix is to show people that the law offers a viable notion of justice, whatever that might entail.
I agree. I just don't think the system is as broken as you seem to think it is. Compared to almost any other place and time, the system is the best.
> Those answers are all wrong. The purpose of the law is this: to convince people not to take matters into their own hands.
Btw, while I do agree with this in a democracy, note that many, many people throughout history (and today!) live and have lived in places where some people really are above the law. That doesn't seem to preclude society functioning.
Have you lost a loved one because health insurance refused or delayed payment for treatment? I can't take you seriously when you say the system isn't that broken when I see people sharing their experiences of how people died and suffered unnecessarily because some health insurance company fought them on it. How is that not insanely broken?
Here in Germany, I've never had to worry about whether my healthcare would pay my treatment when I've had to go to the hospital and had to be operated on. The idea that this is possible in other countries is unfathomable to me. I didn't choose to have whatever illness I might have. My doctor decided the best way to treat my illness. Why does some third party get to decide "but nah bro, it can't be that bad, let's just wait and see how the patient does in a week or two". Why can they override what a doctor thinks is best?
And why are there people like you who thinks "it's not that bad/broken".
- 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.