10 ms·

Assassination is a leaky abstraction

90 points by drc500free 2y ago

dave333 2y ago
Maybe when Musk is done with the govmint he can fix healthcare.
cocacola1 2y ago
I don't think the shooter could get a fair trial in the US because I'm not sure they could find a jury to convict them. I don't think I've seen a shooting that's been so devoid of any sympathy for the victim. Looking inward, though, I find myself more intrigued at the reaction than horrified by the killing.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  If the shooter is ever caught he will probably die while "resisting arrest". A trial gives him a platform, and as you say a jury of his peers is unlikely to convict him.
  - scarfaceneo 2y ago
    Stakes will be too high for that. The risk of that backfiring will be immense. Well, there’s always the chance of claiming the shooter got away, and be lying in a ditch somewhere
- skepticATX 2y ago
  The loudest opinions surface. I wouldn’t take lack of public sympathy to mean that the average American condones this type of behavior. I am no more sympathetic than I am towards the many people killed each day in the US, but I think the assassination and the subsequent justification of it because he was a small cog in the system is abhorrent. And I hope that the majority of the country feels the same way.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    Whether or not the assassination is justified, I don't think it makes sense to call him a small cog. He's the leader of one of the largest health insurance companies in America.
    - cadamsau 2y ago
      As much as I hate to point it out, it’s not so simple. He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value. There’s some wiggle room in how that’s accomplished, but not as much as it seems from the outside. That does make him, much as I hate to say it, a small cog.
      - throw0101d 2y ago
        > He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value. [citation needed] There is no legal basis for this: * https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-the-cult-of-shareholder-value-wrecked-american-business/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd=&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-t... * https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/ https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-i... It is simply one view that just happened to become popular during the Reagan years and has continued on: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine And while we're at it, shareholders are not the owners of a corporation: * https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/12/who-actually-owns-corporations-anyway https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/12/who-actually-own...
      - revscat 2y ago
        [flagged]
        cadamsau 2y ago
        Justice is subjective. What is a crime is subjective. Hence we have laws - an eternal, never perfect project to find an agreed definition of justice. Abandoning centuries of precedent of law happens in some places from time to time and they’re not places you’d live by choice.
- smitty1e 2y ago
  > not sure they could find a jury to convict them A trial should be about setting forth the law and the facts and letting the jury handle any relevant "leaky abstractions". It's fairly clear that the act was illegal. If the facts conclusively show that J. Random Somebody pulled the trigger, then conviction should be the non-leaky return from the jury() function. But, then, IANAL, and our legal system has seemed less than water-tight of late, so we'll see.
  - mostlysimilar 2y ago
    Humans aren't computers.
  - sumeno 2y ago
    Jury nullification exists
- hintymad 2y ago
  This sentiment reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen. Gerald Butler's role Clyde Shelton could've single-handedly avenged his family from the get-go, yet he chose to also take his vengeance on the justice system as well. Yet somehow many viewers still think that Clyde was righteous and it was a pity that Jamie Foxx's role Nick Rice didn't get punished enough.
revscat 2y ago
[flagged]
- sitkack 2y ago
  I think the market has spoken.
- fhub 2y ago
  About 1% of VFIAX is UnitedHealthcare. This is my main mutual fund holding. Product idea: auto short selling in proportion to your holdings for companies you dislike.
- dfxm12 2y ago
  People understand the trolley problem as a thought experiment. Here, we have a big, fat, man who switched the tracks to let the train roll over as many people as he could in order to save a bag of cash.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
  While correct, i wonder when the car insurers, home insurer CEOs etc will suffer the same fate. Answer: they won't. Because they provide a valuable service. The problem is that healthcare insurance is no longer connected to the value of protection against accidents and extreme, unforseen situations. Until and unless we recognize that medical insurance only turned into an all you can eat medical buffet in the last 70 years due to government intervention, we will be doomed to continue to bankrupt society with money transfers to captive markets dominated by AETNA, CIGNA, UHC , etc
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    Double check your home owner's coverage. Based on a conversation with my home insurer, when there is damage to my home, they will only pay out in cases where there I have clear evidence that damage was caused by a third party physically striking my property. Weather? No. Damage caused by incorrect installations? No. Damage caused by ground shaking from reckless construction next door? No. They would have to literally ram some piece of their equipment into my home for me to have grounds for a claim. In this situation, they're just a middle man for a lawyer taking up an easy civil case.
Rebelgecko 2y ago
>So when UHC’s CEO was assassinated yesterday morning, on his way to brag to his shareholders about record profits IMO a lot of the discourse on this topic is based more on vibes that reality. UnitedHealthCare's profits are down YoY- both in absolute #s and in terms of their operating margin. (from 6.6% down to 5.6%). But if you frame the assassination as "CEO who has reduced the degree by which his company profits from sick people", you end up with a whole different batch of theories and motives. (note that UnitedHealthcare is a subset of UnitedHealthcare Group, so you have to dig into their filings to see UHC's numbers broken out)
- orwin 2y ago
  What really triggers me is that private healthcare operation costs are so high in the US. Ok, 5% operating margin. So for every 100 dollars paid to private insurance, you should expect what, 80 dollars to be paid for medical expenses ? It's less than 70. Honestly I bought into the 'private sector is more efficient' quite a bit. In healthcare this simply isn't the case. In my country, depending on the year, for every 100€ the state give to our public insurance, between 88 and 93€ go to pay for medical expenses.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dfxm12 2y ago
      I look forward to 2025, when the US poor stop subsidizing world state-managed healthcare Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
      - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
        My understanding is that HHS under RFK (The next administration's intended US Health Director) will drop government contracts with device or drug manufacturers selling medicare-covered goods abroad, at a fraction of the US medicare rate. That way the Medicare dollars from a grocery clerk worker in Delaware is not subsidizing the cheap lifestyle drug of someone in germany, for example.
panarky 2y ago
You can exploit people for decades before they rise up and murder you. Leaders misinterpret decades of bloodlessness as peace, and as license to exploit even harder. But when the exploiters rig the legal system and the political system to deny people justice, eventually there will be blood. This is how it has always been. The ancient cycles of exploitation and payback are not about to stop now.
morkalork 2y ago
Well, I thought it was well written.
lmm 2y ago
Expecting individuals to hold a large organisation back from doing the things its incentivised to do solely through their personal morality is never going to work, and killing one dude doesn't change that. The entity interprets integrity as damage and routes around it. Railing against "greed" is an easy way to avoid doing anything that might actually change things. Ever wonder why only one country has these healthcare companies making such huge profits, and it's a country whose health outcomes are so much worse than its peers? It's not because their people are greedier than others, or more alienated, or individually less moral. It's because their health system is set up to reward that behaviour. (And if you want zip code to be less of a predictive feature, maybe legalise building housing. Or let your data analysts talk honestly about race, either would work.)
- wongarsu 2y ago
  If such shootings became more common then they would provide an incentive for change. As a tool for punishment they are flawed, as a tool for change they are crude but potentially effective. Somebody is going to be appointed new CEO, and I think it's hard to deny that "if you produce too many bad health outcomes that reduces your own life expectancy" isn't a powerful motivator, no matter what the rest of the system rewards. Policy change would be a better tool towards that end. But even the tiniest steps in that direction like Obamacare/ACA get heavy opposition.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > Somebody is going to be appointed new CEO, and I think it's hard to deny that "if you produce too many bad health outcomes that reduces your own life expectancy" isn't a powerful motivator, no matter what the rest of the system rewards. In the unlikely event that they appointed a CEO who felt sufficiently at-risk to issue orders to improve health outcomes at the expense of profit, how much effect would those orders have? Most likely the people below him would just ignore that CEO, find ways to rationalise that he didn't mean what he was saying. If necessary the board would go around the CEO and talk to the layer below him directly.
itsaride 2y ago
[flagged]
lordofgibbons 2y ago
I've never heard of a premeditated murder in broad daylight be so universally celebrated by Americans regardless of their political leanings. Other insurance companies have already started taking down personal information about their leadership teams. I guess they're afraid of copy-cats. But will it change anything related to their scummy business model, or will the state assert itself to maintain the status quo?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
monkeybutton 2y ago
[flagged]
dfxm12 2y ago
it’s not clear what the fallout will be Some fallout: https://www.axios.com/2024/12/05/blue-cross-blue-shield-anesthesia-anthem-connecticut-new-york https://www.axios.com/2024/12/05/blue-cross-blue-shield-anes...
seventytwo 2y ago
[flagged]
drc500free 2y ago
Hey folks. I know this one is a touchy subject. It is in no way intended to pile on those who are gleefully mocking a murder, and I should have probably included the subtitle ("Towards Ethical Data Science"). Rather, it's an encouragement for people who are paid to build software and data systems that shape people's lives to take a moment to reflect on that impact.
paxys 2y ago
"Here's what assassinations taught me about B2B sales."
smitty1e 2y ago
I submit that human beings are the Leaky Abstraction, and the techo-fetishing involved in reducing society to a series of spreadsheets and AI models is the Orwellian bugaboo. In my Glorious Future of Applied Handwaving, the system would trade some economies of scale for smaller organizations with more individual interactions. This involves some mechanism alongside the almighty dollar as an organizing mechanism. I don't know what that is. When the Leaky Abstractions happen, the flooding would be less severe.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Is he suggesting the suspect should have targeted the data scientist not the CEO.
dang 2y ago
Recent and related: Health Insurance Companies Take Down Leadership Pages Following Murder of UH CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335775 - Dec 2024 (2 comments) Moderators Delete Reddit Thread as Doctors Torch Dead UnitedHealthcare CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42332347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42332347 - Dec 2024 (47 comments) United Healthcare CEO Shooting: Message May Have Been Left on Bullets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42328207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42328207 - Dec 2024 (6 comments) Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder: 'My Empathy Is Out of Network' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327272 - Dec 2024 (399 comments) UnitedHealthcare CEO fatally shot in midtown Manhattan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317968 - Dec 2024 (1 comment) UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317604 - Dec 2024 (444 comments)
- relaxing 2y ago
  None of those articles are addressing the event from the perspective of engineering ethics, as this blog does. Why does this article remain flagged?
  - dang 2y ago
    Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I suppose it's because the article is an opinion piece and there have been several major threads about the story already.
    - drc500free 2y ago
      TBH, it doesn't look like it's spurring much discussion about the engineering ethics angle.
      - relaxing 2y ago
        It was nuked before many people could see it. Tendency of the median HN poster to not RTFA notwithstanding.
scarfaceneo 2y ago
HN: “you know, in reality the French Revolution was actually a bad thing. Feudalism is where it’s at”

90 points by drc500free 2y ago

Maybe when Musk is done with the govmint he can fix healthcare.

I don't think the shooter could get a fair trial in the US because I'm not sure they could find a jury to convict them. I don't think I've seen a shooting that's been so devoid of any sympathy for the victim. Looking inward, though, I find myself more intrigued at the reaction than horrified by the killing.

wongarsu 2y ago
If the shooter is ever caught he will probably die while "resisting arrest". A trial gives him a platform, and as you say a jury of his peers is unlikely to convict him.
- scarfaceneo 2y ago
  Stakes will be too high for that. The risk of that backfiring will be immense. Well, there’s always the chance of claiming the shooter got away, and be lying in a ditch somewhere
skepticATX 2y ago
The loudest opinions surface. I wouldn’t take lack of public sympathy to mean that the average American condones this type of behavior. I am no more sympathetic than I am towards the many people killed each day in the US, but I think the assassination and the subsequent justification of it because he was a small cog in the system is abhorrent. And I hope that the majority of the country feels the same way.
- harimau777 2y ago
  Whether or not the assassination is justified, I don't think it makes sense to call him a small cog. He's the leader of one of the largest health insurance companies in America.
  - cadamsau 2y ago
    As much as I hate to point it out, it’s not so simple. He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value. There’s some wiggle room in how that’s accomplished, but not as much as it seems from the outside. That does make him, much as I hate to say it, a small cog.
    - throw0101d 2y ago
      > He had a legally enforceable mandate to maximize shareholder value. [citation needed] There is no legal basis for this: * https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-the-cult-of-shareholder-value-wrecked-american-business/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein&clsrd=&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/09/how-t... * https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/ https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-i... It is simply one view that just happened to become popular during the Reagan years and has continued on: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine And while we're at it, shareholders are not the owners of a corporation: * https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/12/who-actually-owns-corporations-anyway https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/12/who-actually-own...
    - revscat 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - cadamsau 2y ago
        Justice is subjective. What is a crime is subjective. Hence we have laws - an eternal, never perfect project to find an agreed definition of justice. Abandoning centuries of precedent of law happens in some places from time to time and they’re not places you’d live by choice.
smitty1e 2y ago
> not sure they could find a jury to convict them A trial should be about setting forth the law and the facts and letting the jury handle any relevant "leaky abstractions". It's fairly clear that the act was illegal. If the facts conclusively show that J. Random Somebody pulled the trigger, then conviction should be the non-leaky return from the jury() function. But, then, IANAL, and our legal system has seemed less than water-tight of late, so we'll see.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  Humans aren't computers.
- sumeno 2y ago
  Jury nullification exists
hintymad 2y ago
This sentiment reminds me of the movie Law Abiding Citizen. Gerald Butler's role Clyde Shelton could've single-handedly avenged his family from the get-go, yet he chose to also take his vengeance on the justice system as well. Yet somehow many viewers still think that Clyde was righteous and it was a pity that Jamie Foxx's role Nick Rice didn't get punished enough.

revscat 2y ago

[flagged]

sitkack 2y ago
I think the market has spoken.
fhub 2y ago
About 1% of VFIAX is UnitedHealthcare. This is my main mutual fund holding. Product idea: auto short selling in proportion to your holdings for companies you dislike.
dfxm12 2y ago
People understand the trolley problem as a thought experiment. Here, we have a big, fat, man who switched the tracks to let the train roll over as many people as he could in order to save a bag of cash.
IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
While correct, i wonder when the car insurers, home insurer CEOs etc will suffer the same fate. Answer: they won't. Because they provide a valuable service. The problem is that healthcare insurance is no longer connected to the value of protection against accidents and extreme, unforseen situations. Until and unless we recognize that medical insurance only turned into an all you can eat medical buffet in the last 70 years due to government intervention, we will be doomed to continue to bankrupt society with money transfers to captive markets dominated by AETNA, CIGNA, UHC , etc
- dfxm12 2y ago
  Double check your home owner's coverage. Based on a conversation with my home insurer, when there is damage to my home, they will only pay out in cases where there I have clear evidence that damage was caused by a third party physically striking my property. Weather? No. Damage caused by incorrect installations? No. Damage caused by ground shaking from reckless construction next door? No. They would have to literally ram some piece of their equipment into my home for me to have grounds for a claim. In this situation, they're just a middle man for a lawyer taking up an easy civil case.

Rebelgecko 2y ago

>So when UHC’s CEO was assassinated yesterday morning, on his way to brag to his shareholders about record profits IMO a lot of the discourse on this topic is based more on vibes that reality. UnitedHealthCare's profits are down YoY- both in absolute #s and in terms of their operating margin. (from 6.6% down to 5.6%). But if you frame the assassination as "CEO who has reduced the degree by which his company profits from sick people", you end up with a whole different batch of theories and motives. (note that UnitedHealthcare is a subset of UnitedHealthcare Group, so you have to dig into their filings to see UHC's numbers broken out)

orwin 2y ago
What really triggers me is that private healthcare operation costs are so high in the US. Ok, 5% operating margin. So for every 100 dollars paid to private insurance, you should expect what, 80 dollars to be paid for medical expenses ? It's less than 70. Honestly I bought into the 'private sector is more efficient' quite a bit. In healthcare this simply isn't the case. In my country, depending on the year, for every 100€ the state give to our public insurance, between 88 and 93€ go to pay for medical expenses.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    I look forward to 2025, when the US poor stop subsidizing world state-managed healthcare Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
    - IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
      My understanding is that HHS under RFK (The next administration's intended US Health Director) will drop government contracts with device or drug manufacturers selling medicare-covered goods abroad, at a fraction of the US medicare rate. That way the Medicare dollars from a grocery clerk worker in Delaware is not subsidizing the cheap lifestyle drug of someone in germany, for example.

panarky 2y ago

You can exploit people for decades before they rise up and murder you. Leaders misinterpret decades of bloodlessness as peace, and as license to exploit even harder. But when the exploiters rig the legal system and the political system to deny people justice, eventually there will be blood. This is how it has always been. The ancient cycles of exploitation and payback are not about to stop now.

morkalork 2y ago

Well, I thought it was well written.

lmm 2y ago

Expecting individuals to hold a large organisation back from doing the things its incentivised to do solely through their personal morality is never going to work, and killing one dude doesn't change that. The entity interprets integrity as damage and routes around it. Railing against "greed" is an easy way to avoid doing anything that might actually change things. Ever wonder why only one country has these healthcare companies making such huge profits, and it's a country whose health outcomes are so much worse than its peers? It's not because their people are greedier than others, or more alienated, or individually less moral. It's because their health system is set up to reward that behaviour. (And if you want zip code to be less of a predictive feature, maybe legalise building housing. Or let your data analysts talk honestly about race, either would work.)

wongarsu 2y ago
If such shootings became more common then they would provide an incentive for change. As a tool for punishment they are flawed, as a tool for change they are crude but potentially effective. Somebody is going to be appointed new CEO, and I think it's hard to deny that "if you produce too many bad health outcomes that reduces your own life expectancy" isn't a powerful motivator, no matter what the rest of the system rewards. Policy change would be a better tool towards that end. But even the tiniest steps in that direction like Obamacare/ACA get heavy opposition.
- lmm 2y ago
  > Somebody is going to be appointed new CEO, and I think it's hard to deny that "if you produce too many bad health outcomes that reduces your own life expectancy" isn't a powerful motivator, no matter what the rest of the system rewards. In the unlikely event that they appointed a CEO who felt sufficiently at-risk to issue orders to improve health outcomes at the expense of profit, how much effect would those orders have? Most likely the people below him would just ignore that CEO, find ways to rationalise that he didn't mean what he was saying. If necessary the board would go around the CEO and talk to the layer below him directly.

itsaride 2y ago

[flagged]

lordofgibbons 2y ago

I've never heard of a premeditated murder in broad daylight be so universally celebrated by Americans regardless of their political leanings. Other insurance companies have already started taking down personal information about their leadership teams. I guess they're afraid of copy-cats. But will it change anything related to their scummy business model, or will the state assert itself to maintain the status quo?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

monkeybutton 2y ago

[flagged]

dfxm12 2y ago

it’s not clear what the fallout will be Some fallout: https://www.axios.com/2024/12/05/blue-cross-blue-shield-anesthesia-anthem-connecticut-new-york https://www.axios.com/2024/12/05/blue-cross-blue-shield-anes...

seventytwo 2y ago

[flagged]

drc500free 2y ago

Hey folks. I know this one is a touchy subject. It is in no way intended to pile on those who are gleefully mocking a murder, and I should have probably included the subtitle ("Towards Ethical Data Science"). Rather, it's an encouragement for people who are paid to build software and data systems that shape people's lives to take a moment to reflect on that impact.

paxys 2y ago

"Here's what assassinations taught me about B2B sales."

smitty1e 2y ago

I submit that human beings are the Leaky Abstraction, and the techo-fetishing involved in reducing society to a series of spreadsheets and AI models is the Orwellian bugaboo. In my Glorious Future of Applied Handwaving, the system would trade some economies of scale for smaller organizations with more individual interactions. This involves some mechanism alongside the almighty dollar as an organizing mechanism. I don't know what that is. When the Leaky Abstractions happen, the flooding would be less severe.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Is he suggesting the suspect should have targeted the data scientist not the CEO.

dang 2y ago

Recent and related: Health Insurance Companies Take Down Leadership Pages Following Murder of UH CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42335775 - Dec 2024 (2 comments) Moderators Delete Reddit Thread as Doctors Torch Dead UnitedHealthcare CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42332347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42332347 - Dec 2024 (47 comments) United Healthcare CEO Shooting: Message May Have Been Left on Bullets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42328207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42328207 - Dec 2024 (6 comments) Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder: 'My Empathy Is Out of Network' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327272 - Dec 2024 (399 comments) UnitedHealthcare CEO fatally shot in midtown Manhattan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317968 - Dec 2024 (1 comment) UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42317604 - Dec 2024 (444 comments)

relaxing 2y ago
None of those articles are addressing the event from the perspective of engineering ethics, as this blog does. Why does this article remain flagged?
- dang 2y ago
  Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I suppose it's because the article is an opinion piece and there have been several major threads about the story already.
  - drc500free 2y ago
    TBH, it doesn't look like it's spurring much discussion about the engineering ethics angle.
    - relaxing 2y ago
      It was nuked before many people could see it. Tendency of the median HN poster to not RTFA notwithstanding.

scarfaceneo 2y ago

HN: “you know, in reality the French Revolution was actually a bad thing. Feudalism is where it’s at”