4 ms·

Same as it ever was. You see the same kind of thing is the food industry, pharmaceutical industry, tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, etc. On the one hand

Same as it ever was. You see the same kind of thing is the food industry, pharmaceutical industry, tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, etc. On the one hand it's almost inevitable. Who (outside of the government) is going to care enough about the results of stuff like this to fund it if not the industry affected? You also often need the industry's help if you're doing anything that involves large sample sizes or some kind of mass production. On the other hand it puts a big fat question mark over any policy-affecting findings since there's an incentive not to piss off the donors/helpers.

imiric 9mo ago
The people in these industries are collectively responsible for millions of preventable deaths, and they, their families, and generations of their offspring are and will be living the best lives money can buy. And yet one person kills a CEO, and they're a terrorist.
- windowpains 9mo ago
  You say “a CEO” like it’s just a fungible human unit. In reality, a CEO is much much more valuable than a median human. Think of how many shareholders are impacted, many little old grey haired grannies, dependent on their investments for food, shelter and medical expenses. When you think of the fuller context, surely you see how sociopathic it is to shrug at the killing of a CEO, let alone a CEO of a major corporation. Or maybe sociopathy is the norm these days, for the heavily online guys.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    The CEO literally is a fungible human unit. Any job can be learned.
    - terminalshort 9mo ago
      In that case it also accomplishes nothing to kill him because another will just take his place. So either way you lose.
      - asdff 9mo ago
        A message is certainly sent in the process that previously was going unheard. "Former UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty published an op-ed in The New York Times shortly after the killing, expressing sympathy with public frustrations over the “flawed” healthcare system. The CEO of another insurer called on the industry to rebuild trust with the wider public, writing: “We are sorry, and we can and will be better.” Mr. Thompson’s death also forced a public reckoning over prior authorization. In June, nearly 50 insurers, including UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna and Humana, signed a voluntary pledge to streamline prior authorization processes, reduce the number of procedures requiring authorization and ensure all clinical denials are reviewed by medical professionals. " https://www.beckerspayer.com/payer/one-year-after-ceo-killing-unitedhealth-navigates-a-financial-reset/ https://www.beckerspayer.com/payer/one-year-after-ceo-killin...
  - quesera 9mo ago
    CEOs are not special humans. They know lots of people, but that's not an unusual trait. When one gets fired, quits, retires, or dies, you get a new one. Pretty fungible, honestly. But yeah, shooting people is a bad decision in almost all cases.
- terminalshort 9mo ago
  Large and complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable and have tradeoffs and consequences that can't be foreseen by anybody. Error rates are never zero. So basically anything large enough is going to kill people in one way or another. There are intelligent ways to deal with this, and then there is shooting the CEO, which will change nothing because the next CEO faces the exact same set of choices and incentives as the last one.
  - BrenBarn 9mo ago
    Well, given what you said, one obvious mechanism is to cap the sizes of these organizations so that any errors are less impactful. Break up every single company into little pieces.
    - terminalshort 9mo ago
      That doesn't really help because the complexity isn't just internal to the companies, but also exists in the network between entities that make up the industry. I may well even make it worse because it is much harder to coordinate. e.g. If I run into a bug cause by another team at work, it's massively easier to get that fixed than if the bug is in vendor software. In terms of health insurance, which is the industry where the CEO got shot, we can pretty definitively say that it's worse. More centralized systems in Europe tend to perform better. If you double the number of insurance companies, then you double the number of different systems every hospital has to integrate with. We see this on the internet too. It's massively more centralized than 20 years ago, and when Cloudflare goes down it's major news. But from a user's perspective the internet is more reliable than ever. It's just that when 1% of users face an outage once a day it gets no attention, but when 100% of users face an outage once a year everyone hears about it even though it is more reliable than the former scenario.
  - asdff 9mo ago
    Pretty predictable what happens when you deny coverage for a treatment someone needs
    - 9mo ago

imiric 9mo ago

The people in these industries are collectively responsible for millions of preventable deaths, and they, their families, and generations of their offspring are and will be living the best lives money can buy. And yet one person kills a CEO, and they're a terrorist.

windowpains 9mo ago
You say “a CEO” like it’s just a fungible human unit. In reality, a CEO is much much more valuable than a median human. Think of how many shareholders are impacted, many little old grey haired grannies, dependent on their investments for food, shelter and medical expenses. When you think of the fuller context, surely you see how sociopathic it is to shrug at the killing of a CEO, let alone a CEO of a major corporation. Or maybe sociopathy is the norm these days, for the heavily online guys.
- asdff 9mo ago
  The CEO literally is a fungible human unit. Any job can be learned.
  - terminalshort 9mo ago
    In that case it also accomplishes nothing to kill him because another will just take his place. So either way you lose.
    - asdff 9mo ago
      A message is certainly sent in the process that previously was going unheard. "Former UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty published an op-ed in The New York Times shortly after the killing, expressing sympathy with public frustrations over the “flawed” healthcare system. The CEO of another insurer called on the industry to rebuild trust with the wider public, writing: “We are sorry, and we can and will be better.” Mr. Thompson’s death also forced a public reckoning over prior authorization. In June, nearly 50 insurers, including UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna and Humana, signed a voluntary pledge to streamline prior authorization processes, reduce the number of procedures requiring authorization and ensure all clinical denials are reviewed by medical professionals. " https://www.beckerspayer.com/payer/one-year-after-ceo-killing-unitedhealth-navigates-a-financial-reset/ https://www.beckerspayer.com/payer/one-year-after-ceo-killin...
- quesera 9mo ago
  CEOs are not special humans. They know lots of people, but that's not an unusual trait. When one gets fired, quits, retires, or dies, you get a new one. Pretty fungible, honestly. But yeah, shooting people is a bad decision in almost all cases.
terminalshort 9mo ago
Large and complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable and have tradeoffs and consequences that can't be foreseen by anybody. Error rates are never zero. So basically anything large enough is going to kill people in one way or another. There are intelligent ways to deal with this, and then there is shooting the CEO, which will change nothing because the next CEO faces the exact same set of choices and incentives as the last one.
- BrenBarn 9mo ago
  Well, given what you said, one obvious mechanism is to cap the sizes of these organizations so that any errors are less impactful. Break up every single company into little pieces.
  - terminalshort 9mo ago
    That doesn't really help because the complexity isn't just internal to the companies, but also exists in the network between entities that make up the industry. I may well even make it worse because it is much harder to coordinate. e.g. If I run into a bug cause by another team at work, it's massively easier to get that fixed than if the bug is in vendor software. In terms of health insurance, which is the industry where the CEO got shot, we can pretty definitively say that it's worse. More centralized systems in Europe tend to perform better. If you double the number of insurance companies, then you double the number of different systems every hospital has to integrate with. We see this on the internet too. It's massively more centralized than 20 years ago, and when Cloudflare goes down it's major news. But from a user's perspective the internet is more reliable than ever. It's just that when 1% of users face an outage once a day it gets no attention, but when 100% of users face an outage once a year everyone hears about it even though it is more reliable than the former scenario.
- asdff 9mo ago
  Pretty predictable what happens when you deny coverage for a treatment someone needs
  - 9mo ago