Sometimes I wonder if these people read back what they just wrote and think about how some of these statements look. If you do 9-9-6 for 3 months because otherwise your company will go bankrupt, then fair enough, desperate times call for desperate measures... but if it's a "company culture", then you're a fucking exploitative scumbag, plain and simple.
You see a lot of devs complaining about "crunch time" in the games industry, they're very vocal about that, and while I understand that's an issue too, people (and by people I mean serious journalists) need to focus on Elon because this shit has gone unchecked for way too long and affects vastly more workers given the size of his companies.
Oh wow. I seriously considered working at comma (the company I believe George Hotz is referencing in that post) once. After reading "[Elon Musk] […] had all the same ideas as me", I feel like I dodged a bullet.
When all the acceptable solutions are taken off the table, people start turning to unacceptable solutions. It's not good, because the erosion of social institutions will worsen the situation for everyone, but the only way to deal with this is to put the acceptable solutions back on the table. If we don't want to live and die through the inevitable consequences, our government needs to stop the corporate abuse of power that has led to this.
Murder isn't the same as homicide. By definition the death penalty isn't murder, because it's state sanctioned. Self defense, another example of legal killing, also isn't murder and most people who are against murder would consider a death in self defense to be justified and not murder.
Self defense can give mitigating circumstances in some legal systems, but it’s not an ethical joker to kill whoever we self-decreed feels as representing a threat.
For example, we can go into treacherous schemes that pushes our neighbors into paths where the only obvious option they can still perceive as a way to escape our shenanigans is an attempt to kill us, and as they come with this very real intention to kill us, press the button we had prepared to trigger some mortal trap.
> Considering that a lot of innocent people are murdered by the state via jury and trial in the US the distinction isn't very clear imo.
~211 people were killed via trial sentence in the US in the last 10 years [0]. Presumably some of them weren't innocent. In the same time period (conservatively) 8500 were killed by law enforcement outside of the legal process [1].
Both are problematic, but calling <20 people/year (out of a third of a billion people) "a lot" is missing the forest for the tiny sprig of moss.
You could easily argue the opposite is also possible to be true - if by "murder" you mean "killing" in general.
It's quite possible for someone to hold that a killing in self-defense is much more defensible than the deliberate execution even after a conviction and trial of someone who is "no longer harmful to society" because they're locked up.
Maybe. But do you have an example of a society that do both death sentence and provide fair trial plus peers conviction?
Making prevailing the idea that some humans can reach a level of certainty that is high enough to put a death sentence on some people they didn’t even knew before that is telling a lot. Like, we humans never make errors, we don’t have any kind of cultural and idiosyncratic biases, we never have conflict of interest and we can’t be manipulated by miscellaneous social forces.
Murder is bad, and murder en masse committed through institutionalized legitimating mechanisms is thus extremely bad, as as many times as bad as how many people it kills.
Legal murder through institutions never prevented a society to have "random" citizen going awry and kill other people, but it never missed to add supplementary threats to all their citizen.
This. The cognitive dissonance is jarring. And no "that's different!" is no argument. Like it or not, our government leads by example. And the example is not a good one.
This is because the US is not one homogenous system of thought, but rather a mosaic of people with differing views. (This goes for any other country or population for that matter.)
A more constructive observation would be to consider the overlap in groups of people who (1) hold that murder is indefensible in any case, and (2) hold that death sentences are appropriate for crimes. While not sharing that view myself, I could think of a few factors that may lead others to espouse it, such as:
- an implicit trust in authority and deterrents (follow rule, "or else");
- feeling of being mostly immune to errors in the justice system ("this would never happen to me");
- a propensity to desire revenge but only when it pertains to "others" ("I'm a good person, we must punish the bad people")...
Murder is by definition an unlawful homicide. This isn’t just pedantry; it’s the most parsimonious explanation for why someone would support the death penalty and object to something like the assassination.
Until the day we can point to a country that implements a direct democracy with a fair way to obtain citizenship for whoever is involved in its society, all laws will always remain a tool of a minority to arbitrarily rule a majority.
The concern is not whether laws are rights or wrongs, but which privileges and which hurts they reinforce for which classes in the society where the national myth is eager to present them as the applied rules.
> Until the day we can point to a country that implements a direct democracy with a fair way to obtain citizenship for whoever is involved in its society, all laws will always remain a tool of a minority to arbitrarily rule a majority.
For the same reason we might want to distinguish between well functioning government and direct democracy.
First, direct democracy is kind of a pleonasma, that is in its core democracy has to put equals duties and means to all its citizens. It's clear probably why such a system can easily attract masses, as it promises to maintain political power in the hands of those who have to obey it. Note that this definition insist more on duties and means, which is a very different promise from a populist statement on "righteous rights for everyone thanks to a turn key plan you don't even need to investigate on applicability". People certainly are interested with more democracy, so their slavers scam them with all kind of system under the label democracy which never give them these duties and means that you can expect to see attached to an effective democratic citizen.
The initial proposition was that it is pedantry to distinguish between the quality of the killing when the form of governance is not a well functioning democracy - something that would appear to be well established as the US has no issues going into other countries and kill leaders under the argument that it is not democracies.
The question is not so much the quality of the US democracy but to what extend it can even be classified as a well functioning democracy.
The US resembles an oligarchy, and when the laws are written by the rich and profit seeking that will affect how killings are perceived such as killing in the name of corporate profits will become alright.
It's a little different when a jury of your peers convicts you of a crime which was democratically passed by a legislature, versus a lone gunman who feels he is the judge, jury, and executioner.
America is the land of stand your ground laws in which a citizen may legally take a life if they feel endangered. Let's not forget the 1000 or so police kill every year.
In the death row case, the capital punishment isn't murder if you use classic definitions. If you change the definitions then it's only murder if you equate all homicide to murder.
And yes, both the will of the people and tradition can justify capital punishment.
That's fair. And in that vein the current killing of the ceo can not rightfully be deemed a murder as no one have been convicted of such.
But then again, the society apparently defines the quality of a killing - only future history will tell if this is a murder, and thst can go back and forth a lot depending on public sentiment.
Forget gerrymandering, a representative government is impossible as long as the Senate still gives the same weight to the 15 people in North Dakota as it does the 40 million in California.
Not to mention that we happily do extrajudicial assassinations outside of our borders, and the news falls all over themselves to celebrate them.
Everybody knows that plenty excuses a murder, we live in murderous states and in murderous times. The question is whether this murder is excusable, and one's opinion on it is probably dependent on whether one wishes they had that guy's job. Most people wouldn't do it for any price, but plenty would.
> A claim denial that results in denial of life-saving treatment could never be counted as either of those charges.
First-degree murder is when you willingly, and with forethought, plans and carries out the killing of a human. Which seems to me to be 100% what you described.
Denying a claim can not kill someone. Disease and injury killing a person. Claim denial prevents financial support for intervention in resolving a disease or injury. That is not the same thing, and equivocating them is sophistry.
If you’re shot, and I pull up a chair and watch you die without saying a word or helping in any way, especially if I get paid extra for refusing, I’m not sure if I’d call it murder, exactly, but I bet your family and friends would describe me as a killer.
I’d say that not equivocating them is sophistry. In both cases, someone takes a deliberate action that they know will result in an innocent person’s death. I fail to see why the exact mechanism should be so important.
The act of killing a human being is not inherently murder. It specifically communicates an unlawful killing, which the death penalty inherently is not.
I'm trying to figure out if these deaths caused by insurance denials could actually be considered murder. I think they would definitely qualify as being premeditated, but can you consider them "killing"? They are causing death due to omission of expected care, but can the omission of something like medical care be considered the cause of death?
It is weird—I would expect only the folks who make decisions as to which procedures are medically necessary (just doctors ideally) to have a duty of care. But insurance companies are bouncing back procedures are not medically necessary, so maybe we’re due for a re-adjustment in the expectations as to who has that duty.
It is surprising if insurance companies what to sign themselves up for this sort of obligation. But obviously they’ll take all the privileges of the decision making process if we don’t also hold them to the responsibilities.
There are direct measures: someone needs a transplant or something of that nature, refusal is effectively shortening their life and some aggressive prosecutors might craft a case. There are less direct things, I expect a lot of them. say people dealing with long recoveries from things, there are good days and bad days and bouts of depression aren’t uncommon; could antidepressants prevent depression on related suicides? That’s an entire can of worms, people have fallen into depression because they’ve become addicted and can’t kick it, what if it was medical pain killers you’re addicted to? Then suppose some company spent half the funds on ED pills and breast augmentation and some more medically things were denied, you can spin that both ways as they might be doing what the bulk of their customers want. That one is interesting, you could break a bone and have surgical reconstruction and hopefully get a full recovery or maybe you just set it and naturally heal and maybe it’s not 100% fixed, only 85%, there is a substantial cost difference there…
For profit medicine and for profit health insurance is just riddled with moral hazard.
There is legal precedent establishing healthcare providers' obligations in life-threatening situations. The same moral responsibility should exist when insurers deny lifesaving care, it's just hidden behind bureaucracy.
Depends on your philosophy I suppose. For example, Christianity teaches that failing to do good is itself a sin. So that suggests that an omission could be considered to make someone guilty.
I suspect that all modern legal systems have the concept of negligence which could result in someone being considered guilty for someone's death. I imagine in that case whether that's "murder" would come down to whether you mean a legal definition (which might call it something else like "manslaughter") or the colloquial definition.
And guilt isn't a single bucket or item to be handed out to one person. Most if not all moral systems and laws admit of varying degrees of responsibility and culpability and work within that framework (see situations where a bank robbery goes wrong and one robber kills someone and the getaway driver is also charged as an accessory to the killing).
The doctor / hospital that refuses to treat when insurance declines is also involved in the “omission of expected care”. Would they also be guilty of premeditated murder?
Also without this murder, we could imagine that the NYPost would have never written this article to alert on the malfeasance of healthcare providers...
Why wouldn't they do their part as a news org, and why did they wait for the murder to publish such an article, if that murder was not "needed" for things to change, then?
One issue is that if denying medical care is murder then every healthcare system is guilty.
In the US it’s insurance companies (or the government through Medicare or Medicaid) but in the UK it’s NICE, in Canada it’s CADTH and the provincial health authorities.
Since there are finite resources spent on healthcare, trade offs are made all the time. If spending $10M on treatment A saved 10,000 lives and $10M on treatment B saves 1,000 lives, then treatment A gets funded and treatment B doesn’t.
The difference is that patients in the US have an up close and personal experience with denial.
In Canada and the UK they don’t because doctors knows what is covered and what isn’t so never bring up life saving options if they aren’t paid for.
In rare circumstances like cystic fibrosis in the UK, patients become aware that they are being denied a life saving drug and protest, but generally it’s pretty rare because patients just don’t know the option exists.
The difference is that patients in the US are being denied by people lining their own pockets with the savings. In sane countries, there’s at least some basis of trying to do the most good with the resources at hand, which sometimes means denying care for person A because those resources would be better spent on person B. With private insurers in the US, it means denying care for person A because they think they can get away with it and it will increase their profits.
If you actually trace the cashflows, the "people lining their own pockets with the savings" are mainly not the insurers but rather the executives and shareholders for other large companies with self-funded employee health plans. Most insurance companies no longer provide much real insurance but rather primarily administer health plans on behalf of self-funded employers. Due to the minimum medical loss ratio rule, insurers actually make more profit the more claims they approve.
If employers wanted it, insurers would be happy to offer health plans that fully paid every claim with zero denials. This would be enormously profitable for the insurers because they could run those health plans with minimal work. But instead, most employers are constantly looking for ways to cut employee health benefit costs. This means incentives aren't aligned.
> With private insurers in the US, it means denying care for person A because they think they can get away with it and it will increase their profits.
The person at the insurer who denies a claim is not making more money because they denied it. The company as a whole might, but not the person denying it.
The US spends the most budget per patient for the least amount of care, the rest goes into inefficiency and profit (a second kind of inefficiency).
Medicare per-capita spending is more than NHS per capita spending, but the NHS covers everyone.
Of course healthcare is denied in any system (in other systems this is triage), but nowhere to the level United Health does it: over 30%, it's on a completely different scale.
Your argument is completely bogus for multiple reasons. Firstly, people are paying here for insurance, a lot. Secondly, it's the FDA's job to approve treatments which it does. Thirdly, we do not have a uniform privatized determination across the country of what is approvable or not by insurance companies. They deny numerous legitimate treatments and procedures at their whim.
Plenty of treatments are denied in other countries. Not to mention most other countries have private insurance layered on top of public and it’s the same issue - private insurers denying a treatment through their own process.
If US insurers are guilty of murder than most of the worlds insurers are too.
>Well, if a killing is ethically justified, it isn't murder.
Are you saying this as an opinion, or is this an established thing? I thought murder was an "unlawful killing without justification or valid excuse" (paraphrased from Wikipedia), whether one finds it ethical or not is sort of beside the point. Especially because there is no objectively correct ethics.
But, I'm not a lawyer, this is just my understanding.
I would say you have to be careful and specific - as "murder" is usually the domain of the law and "ethically justified* is the domain of ethics.
It's quite easy to come up with situations where the law declares a killing as unequivocally murder yet everyone agrees it was ethically justified. The opposite can happen too.
"Murdering a murderer to save many innocents could be considered ethical by some?"
This is a heavy statement.
More I read, heavy it gets.
Kill people it never the answer. The ideia that "I" have the power is weak. People, together, have power, however they don't know what to do. In his case the easiest way to win is pressuring the government, with the people, for clear changes.
the article cites a study that says: "5% of practitioners reported anesthesia times greater in total than what would be expected across university, community, and specialty hospitals. Furthermore, it was found that the greatest differences in expected anesthesia times were in specialty hospitals compared with university hospitals.8 However, the authors have stressed that their findings should not be interpreted to indicate fraud because fraud involves intent, which could not be determined. Because this study was a retrospective study, the authors could not rule out the alternative but unlikely explanation that the practitioners could be rounding down. The reason for caution by the authors is that the CMS has differentiated fraud from abuse by emphasizing that fraud is intentional, whereas abuse is the result of poor medical practices.2 This differentiation is important because sometimes the rounding in digits ending in 0 or 5 minutes in anesthesia time is part of the organization culture of operating rooms in which rounding is performed systematically by the operation room circulating nurse along with the anesthesia practitioner. Sun et al8 recognized this issue as being related to institutional factors, which was one of the reasons they performed a 2-step regression analysis; long anomalous times were not sufficient to establish inappropriate discretion.8"
So Anthem based on the article it might be overpaying for at worst 5% of the operations BUT the big but is that in some hospitals it is routine to round digits. So paying less workers for some rounding operations? It doesn't look as bad to me. It might be because of reasons, or might be due to media backslash.
I think it's safe to assume we definitely need more research into healthcare companies rules after healthcare companies ceo related killing
I find absolutist stances based on ideology distasteful. History has pretty vividly shown that sometimes killing people is in fact the answer. Something something Nuremburg trials.
I hate the way the press and seemingly most people are approaching this but am completely unsurprised: "You are either a heathen who supports murder or you are a virtuous supporter of the people and this man deserved to die." Two things can be correct at the same time. 1) Murder is not OK. 2) The insurance industry is completely broken as it incentivizes terrible behavior and this CEO was a scumbag who perpetuated this behavior while possibly insider trading.
You can't just shoot people and kill them in the street! That's barbaric! You need to do it from behind a desk through a corporate bureaucracy like a civilized person.
I guess we aren't going back in time to kill Hitler any more then?
The media pearl-clutching is extremely heavy this time around, painting Luigi as an unhinged lunatic and all the rest. It feels incongruent and purposefully dismissive to equate this to something like the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Given the NY Posts leanings I’m not surprised they walked that line by putting it in there.
Media seems to be on an agenda setting tear to disavow the murder, but I think it’s a frankly boot licking response to what is going on here.
I think this spooked a lot of executives (re: “elites” if you will) and there is pressure to ignore the nuance of what the murder means to people and why it isn’t the same as say, stabbing a tech CEO in SF like what happened last year
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You guaranteed it would be a negative interaction when you negatively interacted with the post. You're allowed to skip the ones you don't want to reply to.
The first question that pops into my head (being aware that this is a popular category of apps) is: when do people look at blank tabs? Whenever I open a new tab, it's with the intention of entering an address or a search term, and any content would be an unwelcome distraction.
I'd be more likely to use something like this if it lived under a regular domain name and I could put it into a pinned tab, personally.
I have frequently used sites listed on my new tab, and use those to quickly navigate without typing.
Besides that, I don't use or care about anything on the "new tab" tab. Backgrounds, sounds, weather, news - that's all junk/noise to me. There seems to be no value for me in having them on the empty tab, when they're a click (or, in case of the weather, a glance on my phone or watch) away.
Just how it works for me, of course. Other's mileage may vary.
I do the same as you, but I know of plenty of people (even some developers) whose computing workflow looks like this: Boot computer, log in, start web browser, make it full screen. And that is where they work/play for the whole day.
That describes ChromeOS users of course, but there are Apple and Windows (and presumably Linux) users who have the same workflow.
it's hard to believe a developer working in a fullscreen browser all day could be anywhere near as productive as an equally-skilled dev using a terminal/keyboard-based workflow. how does one install packages, ssh into boxes, extract data from files, etc? or maybe they only work with cloud services and use webapp IDEs/terminals? seems like a bizarre choice (for devs specifically)
I don't literally spend all day in a browser, but I technically use one most of the day since vscode is based on Electron. My second monitor flips between Firefox and my terminal tmux session, about a 50/50 time split. I'm sure there's plenty of other developers like me, using the terminal for a good number of system tasks but just can't kick the mouse habit completely in their editor.
> The first question that pops into my head (being aware that this is a popular category of apps) is: when do people look at blank tabs? Whenever I open a new tab, it's with the intention of entering an address or a search term, and any content would be an unwelcome distraction.
My "startpage" is a four-column list of stuff I usually browse. And usually I sit with my left hand at the left hand side of the keyboard, and with my hand on the mouse on the right. Doing CTRL+T then clicking on where I wanna go, is usually faster and less movements needed than having to manually type the one or two first letters.
I tried sometimes to put "widgets" or other things (like widget on a smartphone) but it's true what you say, it's an unwelcome distraction. But a couple of simple lists seems fine, for me.
Sometimes I'll open a new tab and click the site I want from my commonly used sites Firefox presents to me on the new tab page. In such cases my hand is already on the mouse and two clicks is about the quickest I can get to one of those sites.
I'm the same. The only exception is on mobile, sometimes I'll use the quick pinned bookmarks on the new tab page. But on desktop I load a homepage when I launch the browser and only open a new tab when I need to enter a URL or search query.
A blank tab is super useful when you just want to make some mental space. When you're taking a break but don't want to close everything down or switch to another app.
On my work device, I have daily.dev installed. Every work day, I usually invest 15-20 minutes of catching up with recent news about all things dev and having it as the "new tab" helps me not forgetting about it.
Other than that, yeah, I usually CTRL+T and write right away.
