Lay out the bare facts - this is a premeditated murder of a complete stranger for the purpose of fomenting fear and social upheaval. You'd be hard-pressed to mad-lib that into a situation that didn't call for capital charges. From a motivational and operational standpoint MarioLuigi is a low-effort version of The Unabomber and that dude absolutely faced capital charges.

So things go one of two ways here:

- MarioLuigi goes the Unabomber way and makes the trial a grandstand for all his ideas. He dismisses council that doesn't let him get out his message. Any attempts at insanity pleas or extenuating circumstances are shut down by the defendant, the trial revolves around maximizing exposure for the defendant's ideas and philosophy and MarioLuigi ends up in life in prison without the possibility of parole.

- MarioLuigi goes the FTX way and lawyers up like a mutherfucker. Big expensive lawyers try to contain his outbursts and PR firms portray a complicated portrait of a concerned, promising young man whose only crime is method not motive. Rolling Stone puts his face on the cover, Hulu and Netflix joust over who can suck his cock in the most artfully tasteless way. MarioLuigi ends up in life in prison without the possibility of parole.

So what do you think? 'cuz me? I think this little shit is no Ted Kaczynski. he is, say it with me -

just another TESCREAL dipshit.

I'm willing to go as far as proclaiming Star Trek to be Paramount's Disneyland - you either grew up in it or it's kitschy bullshit. And I grew up in a house with a 2nd-ed concordance.

Having grown up in a survivalist-heavy environment with lots of guns and lots of survivalists (had a friend remark "I coulda won Waco" once) it's entirely about doing what you want and punishing others for doing what you don't want. It's the desire for ultimate power while eschewing ultimate responsibility.

Lol that wasn't wealth that was loans

I tapped the crypto to buy a friend a kidney, I tapped the crypto to buy a replacement for my '95 Dodge, I tapped the crypto to buy the FrankenKern and I tapped the crypto to buy the house. Birth Center is self-supported. Of the seven nearby birth centers it is one of two that survived COVID.

When we were a county distribution point for PPE.

And a designated EMS receiver of ambulances.

And NEVER ONCE had to shut down for COVID.

I dunno how you stayed as involved in it as you did.

because we can't afford professionals lol

We got a grant this year. Could have spent it on "here, Vonage, have $2500 a month so I don't have to deal with gawping assholes." Instead we gave out $47k in bonuses.

But fuck me, $47k prolly coulda hired a hitman so I could go shoot a bitch.

'member that time when they cut childhood poverty in half?

'member the most sweeping reforms against monopolies since FDR?

'member that $2t dems-only package that spared the US economy the worst of COVID economic malaise?

Of course you don't. They're boring. But 'member when the libs went "maybe they'll get used to doing something"

Naaaah you don't remember that either.

I'll go one further: violent solutions must be effective.

A TALE OF TWO TOWERS

Ramzi Youssef set off a fertilizer bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993. It killed 6 people, injured a thousand and broke a lot of glass. The FBI totes knew about it. One of the towers was closed for a few weeks. Some TV stations lost their over-the-air broadcast towers for a few weeks. A couple d00ds went to jail forever.

On the other hand, Osama Bin Laden, world-renowned insurance CEO, had some d00ds fly jetliners into the WTC and the Pentagon. It killed thousands, injured thousands more and radically reshaped American domestic and foreign policy. Ultimately it launched two forever wars, destabilized at least five regimes in the Middle East and reshaped global politics for a generation at least.

Any MFer worth his salt will acknowledge that violent solutions can be effective. Just ask the Mossad. Just ask Zelenski. We're in UR tenements, bombing UR Birdscooters. My argument is that the death of United's CEO at the hand of a privileged TESCREAL dipshit isn't just ineffective it's counterproductive. Further, my argument is that it's fucking pointless to single out a single anonymous bureaucrat when the villain in the movie is a conglomerate of faceless multinational corporations. Brian Thompson - dude who presided over board meetings. Igor Kirrilov? Putin's direct report in charge of unconventional warfare.

There are absolutely CEOs whose assassination would shape the narrative. Elon Musk, obviously. Sam Altman. Mark Zuckerberg. I'll go one further and argue that this is the most target-rich corporate environment since the era of Robber Barons; prior to Zuck I don't know that there would have been a point in killing anyone other than Jack Welch. You have to look at it with a gimlet eye and not just fucking assume that random stochastic violence will accomplish anything.

"I feel like hitting something" is a useless feeling. "I feel like hitting Prof. Plumb in the forehead with the lead pipe" is a plan. "I feel like hitting Ismael Haniyah in the middle of Tehran with a planted bomb" is a useful plan.

Marioluigi had a useless plan that is being bouyed up by useless feelings.

I think 99% of people choose non-violence because you come back from it.

I think 99.9% choose bitching about it on the Internet rather than doing something.

I think "fuck yeah someone shot a bitch" serves to satisfy the urge to do something, so the suppression is feeling smug about a stranger getting shot in the back instead of going to a town hall meeting.

More than that, I think that the people most directly impacted by health insurance shenanigans are so busy dealing with health insurance shenanigans that they don't waste their time being mad on the Internet. They're the ones - like me - raising the issue with the insurance commissioner, who found her inability to do anything an impetus to run for fucking governor.

I want to say "I honestly don't see what's so hard about this" but that would be a lie. What's so hard about this is you don't get to clutch an AR and scream 'wolverines!' like it will accomplish something.

Four Luigi Mangione documentaries are in the works so far

Obviously this is far from a perfect robin hood, in practice, but as a symbol, this has provided an important opportunity to re-center the conversation on class warfare and wealth disparities, and of course healthcare insurance, in particular.

It's clear that many, many people want this. They want to find someone they can blame for health insurance sucking. They want a Robin Hood. They want a Sheriff of Nottingham. My problem? Y'all up in this b acting like I don't understand that. Me. The guy who takes sixteen different insurance plans. The guy whose business is 1/3 Medicaid. The guy who legit has a lobbyist on payroll. me. I'm the one who doesn't get it.

What's clear to me - and which none of y'all care a lick to hear - is that this is going to leave us worse than before.

The narrative requires a good-hearted vigilante with a just cause bypassing the broken rules in order to strike a blow for Truth, Justice and the American Way against the evil oligarchs hell-bent on oppressing the kind citizens of Sherwood Forest. That's what everyone wants. That's what everyone has been pining for. Play up MarioLuigi's history of chronic pain. Play up Sneedly Snodgrass' use of AI in denying claims. Human interest stories about "pretend, offend, be friends" crocheted on toilet cozies. "We got 'em, Lou."

And it's all feel-good murdersegments for GMA until the truth intrudes. Sneedly had two kids. He'd managed public benefits for twenty years. He'd raised concerns about "are we the baddies." Mario isn't a cheerful plumber, he's the Ivy-educated scion of a wealthy east-coast healthcare empire who freaked out his fellow moneyspawn at surf camp. Far from being the hard-luck chronic-health T-J-A-W blowstriker everyone's narrative requires, there's no evidence the sumbitch ever had a claim denied, no evidence he'd ever had Sneedly Insurance, and ample evidence that whatever his life concerns, "I can't pay for my medical care" was not among them.

Hey 'member when that upstart college student was gonna disrupt girl's education so baaaad that everyone was all "sure go ahead and steal a Beastie Boys song?"

Whatever happened with that?

I've seen Goldieblox at Joann Fabrics. They're uninspiring bullshit that sells for pennies on the dollar compared to anything else because their ten minute hype into existence wasn't supported by evidence. It was a rich bitch of privilege cutting the line and expecting to be excused because if you're rich you can grab them by the pussy. Public sentiment went from "girrrrrrrl powRRRRRRRR!!!!!!one" to "well that was embarrassing" in about a news cycle and a half because THE NARRATIVE WAS FALSE. Debbie Silverspoon, for her part, learned that there are better ways to spend a million dollars but who fucking cares daddy buys her whatever she wants anyway.

But that's just bullshit craftcrap being peddled as educational. Nobody got shot. Here's what's already happened in the health insurance industry:

- executives are "othering" their clients

- and billing security details to the company

- and spinning up the PR machine about how great Sneedly was

- and leaning on every influence to make sure Mario's trial sucks all the air out of everything else

- and showing how they are the victim here

Meanwhile, the gentle folk of Sherwood Forest are wrapping their heads around the fact that they lionized a rich psychopath who thinks Joe Rogan is a philosopher. Know who actually did more for class warfare? Billy McFarland.

Wanna see a quote I loved back when I was 23?

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."

But see, then I grew the fuck up. "Shoot the bastards" generally goes badly for everyone. "Shoot the bastards" usually ends up with collateral damage. You see, the problem with bastards is they're better at evil than you are. This is you, screencapping the Washington Post because somehow, a vanity publisher owned by a gazillionaire doesn't carve their headlines in granite.

And all this - all this - is wish fulfillment. Everyone going "yay streetmurder" is imagining themselves being lauded by millions for shooting Sneedly in the back. So lemme put this in scare quotes

"LUIGI MANGIONE IS NOT YOU"

now let's talk about Robin Hood for a minnit. You don't have to dig too deep to see that Robin Hood was a legend the English nobility used to scare the English nobility into not being such dicks that their serfs refused to obey. Fun Fact: that's what Machiavelli's The Prince was about, too - it was one in a long line of medieval self help books intended to keep the nobility in power.

So the narrative everybody - including the insurance companies - wants is the one where the insurance company acted badly and one of its subscribers called them out and they felt bad and they learned and now everyone is friends with the insurance companies because fuckin' hell we pay them a thousand a month at least they could be nice about it. But the one we're going to get? is "don't break the omerta.

'cuz here's the CEO of Aetna supporting single payer. And here's the CEO of Walmart calling for more than doubling the federal minimum wage. See his stock price being punished in the upper right corner? Doug's still on the job and Walmart stock is parabolic because frankly it's the only retailer left.

Mark, on the other hand, got ousted when Aetna got bought by CVS. He knew it was coming. You can see it in his dead eyes.

_____________________________________________________

And here, ultimately, is the conversation I wanted to have with Spence, if only he weren't so busy hugging his ragebear and swaddling in his hopelessblanket.

- Be Luigi Mangione

- Be upset about injustice

- Be mad about healthcare prices and policies

- Be coming home for Christmas

- Be saying "hey grandpa I wanna start taking on the insurance companies that are screwing us over"

- Be saying "hey cuz I feel like our state needs insurance reform"

- Be slipping into a glass slipper held waiting for you since birth

- Be using that Penn degree to actually mutherfucking help people

Because that dude ain't us, man. Ain't us by a fair sight. We can't do any of that shit. I try? I want some fuckin' credit for that, by the way, because everyone here is all "yes yes you support single payer but have you shot a bitch lately" AND FUCK YOU ALL WE PICKAXED AN EXTRA MILLION AND A HALF DOLLARS OUT OF THE STATE THIS YEAR TO SERVE UNDERPRIVILEGED COMMUNITIES but since i didn't shoot a bitch fuck me I guess? 'cuz where y'all go, to a man, is

- Be Luigi Mangione

- Fuck all that

- Shoot a bitch

- Be a hero

And all I'm trying to do? Is stave off the inevitable disappointment when y'all realize that Mario Luigi is, in fact, just another TESCREAL dipshit.

Maszlow's Heirarchy gets beat up a lot by professionals for the same reason Freud does: people are too fucking literal. It's useful from a psych 101 standpoint, though - you aren't gonna care too much about TikTok followers if you don't have a roof over your head.

The day-to-day life of a Puerto Rican whose routine can be disrupted by hurricanes and earthquakes is going to be different than the day-to-day life of a Haitian whose routine can be disrupted by hurricanes, earthquakes, civil unrest, famine and disease. Both of them have a very different outlook than a USPS branch manager in Illinois whose day-to-day is largely going to be impacted by emails from the district office.

Gonna level with ya. I hate zombie movies. A rant I wrote against zombie movies got famous in certain corners of the internet a long time ago. And what I realized then and what I still believe now is that all the disaster-prep bullshit this country leans into so heavily is "commuter syndrome" - that display of unbridled rage against strangers for venial sins.

The thing about survivalism is nobody ever fears clever bad guys. It's always stupid bad guys. During the Cold War, we mostly feared totalitarianism. Maszlow's Hierarchy again - hard to get tweaked out by your neighbors when the Reds could end the world at any minute. The minute nuclear annihilation was no longer on the table, though, the concerns shifted from "V" and "They Live" to tearing down mutherfucking society.

I find Alan Moore's criticisms of superheroes to be cogent - they represent an abandonment of civil society in favor of vigilantism and that, much like you need to be nuked to invent kaiju, you need doomsday weapons to lean so heavily into superpowers. The difference between Batman and Duterte is the costume. Superheroes, kaiju and strongmen all get their strengths from the same place - a fear of complexity. Why investigate the causes of addiction when you can just murder dealers in the street?

I had a buddy in high school who longed for the apocalypse. Why? it meant guns and simplicity. No more worrying about why this girl didn't like him, just go shoot a mutant. There's an othering that's central to survivalism and zombie movies - the former compatriot who tries to eat your brains. Better shoot them before liberal thought causes them to support transgender bathrooms! And ultimately, the dark heart of survivalism is an embracing of otherment. "things will be better when I can shoot anyone coming after my Patriot Pantry."

Yeah. It's definitely about zombies. Uh huh. That's why it wasn't a disease that made everyone "zombies" during COVID, it was wearing a mask and getting microchips injected.

It's a chicken-egg problem, though. Modern survivalism began with The Order, which was inspired by The Turner Diaries, which was published by the National Alliance, which started out as the National Youth Alliance, which was all about George Wallace's racist bid for president. Prior to George Wallace any "prepping" was associated with hard-right government elements - the goal of Civil Defense was to protect all Americans against the creeping influence of godless communism, regardless of color. After George Wallace? White supremacists all the way down.

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead put racism front and center - the only sensible person in that entire movie is black, and in the end he gets shot by a bunch of good ole'boys who use the ghoul uprising to oppress any living blacks. Romero's ouvre is a social commentary about man's inhumanity to man. Every "zombie" movie after that, though, is an excuse to be ooked out by your neighbors and hit them with a baseball bat.

The pandemic was never going to satisfy preppers because a breakdown of order is only necessary to permit the wholesale slaughter of anyone they don't like. "you didn't prepare for this" was an excuse used by Nazis against non-Nazis and will always be a euphemism for "you don't follow our creed." Realistically speaking, the minute the libs started wearing masks those guys who walk around in rad badges and boil their water were going to make a reckless embracing of communal infection a calling card of racial purity.

I wanted you to pause for long enough to hold one of your arguments up to the light and decide for yourself whether it was one that you naturally wanted to make, or whether your internal feelings were getting away with your reason.

I don't have the time or patience to write this today but I'm going to. Because I wouldn't shout until I was blue in the face if it didn't matter. And because I see something really common - hang on there's a graphic for that.

It's from here, BTW. The first thing I want you to notice is that everyone's expectations are wildly out of line with reality. We've all been sold a massive bill of goods. Obviously the younger you are the worse it is - millennials make about 2/3rds that average salary and GenZ makes half (the average GenXer makes $126k as of 2022). The next thing I want you to realize is that those expectations are choices.

The younger you are in America, the more you're choosing to be dissatisfied.

We have a patient. She's on medicaid. She needed some tests run that aren't available to be scheduled in the next six months. So the neurologist we sent her to said "just go to the emergency room and hand them this note." THAT is a protest. She did one better, though - she lost her car keys and didn't feel like looking for them so she called an ambulance. If she were insured? It prolly woulda cost her about $25k. But she isn't so for her it was free. Now THAT is a protest.

She'd probably much rather not have to deal with labs at all. Should millennials be satisfied at $40k a year? Abso-fucking-lutely not. But by assigning a mental goal of "I won't feel successful until I have five million dollars in assets" they're guaranteeing they'll never feel successful. Much like you and your sister: you've set the metric for success at "overturn the system" and you're salty that it's out of reach.

We're here because I said "just another TESCREAL dipshit" and what you said next was remarkable:

What could he have done to improve the lots of healthcare for those with less access?

You didn't even begin to investigate the situation before shooting your mouth off. You are so deep in your "nothing can be done" frame of mind that an Ivy League scion of a multimillionaire family that owns a half dozen medical facilities is justified in shooting a bitch. your level of satisfaction is thoroughly unattainable, so you wallow in helplessness.

Now in the first place, don't fucking feed the accelerationists. This is you and Steve Bannon, nodding and stroking your chins in sync. 'member Fight Club and how the hare-brained scheme was to take down the credit bureaus? There's a lot of air between "take down a credit bureau" and "shoot the CEO of a credit bureau" and you know it but as penance watch a trailer:

You know at a cellular level that the British East India Company was terrible. You have absolutely no idea who the kings were during their heyday and you don't even know how to look up who their executives were, though. So poof. You've got a time machine. You want to make the world a better place. Is your first thought "I'ma go shoot the CEO of the British East India Company?" Because corporations, since 1600, have been about absolving individuals of guilt through collective action and restricting individuals of morality through collective restriction. Maybe Walter Raleigh? Except naaah if it wasn't him it woulda been some other schlub, just following orders, because a bunch of board members wanted the Portuguese plundered and the Irish suppressed. Brian Thompson done got got and has the world changed?

But what really makes me offended is that you've convinced yourself that there's no point in doing anything short of throwing your life away and I've been out here, dozens of hours a week for like eight years now, managing a healthcare clinic that operates largely for the betterment of minorities. We fight insurance companies every.goddamn.day and you don't even realize how offensive it is for you to argue that what we're doing is pointless. You're so in love with your hopeless adolescent male fantasy of nihilistic destruction that you don't give a fuck about spitting in the face of people who are actually doing something.

Now - I'm not going to argue there was no point to capping Brian Thompson. For one thing, this sort of thing gains credibility when there's violence behind it. Terrorism? Mos def. A novel way to demonstrate dissatisfaction with the system? Also that. And see, putting up a poster doesn't involve throwing your life away.

Because here's the real deal, dude. Ours is a society of desperate inequality and that gets worse more often than it gets better, at least in my lifetime. And I appreciate desperate times for desperate measures. But instead of going "poof here's a time machine" I go "poof you have an ivy league degree, a state senator for a cousin and grandparents who own two country clubs and a chain of healthcare facilities what are you going to do to improve the future" and you go

What could he have done to improve the lots of healthcare for those with less access?

And fuck off, man. You can't even show me the courtesy of stopping to think before running your mouth. I deserve better. So does everyone you talk to. The purpose of discussion isn't to profess your ill-conceived emotional positions it's to dialogue and you aren't even trying to hear. It's far more important to you to wail about how hopeless everything is so that you don't have to fucking do something about it.

When they killed Bin Laden, people didn't ask why they didn't work from inside Al Qaeda to slowly reform them.

This is one of the stupidest things I have ever read

bin Laden was the spiritual leader of an organization dedicated to global jihad

he had a direct line of tutelage to Hassan al-Banna

millions of extremists hung on his every missive

Brian Thompson, on the other hand, existed within a public corporation with officers, advisors, investors and Robert's Rules of Order. He'd been voted CEO by a board of directors in 2021. Prior to that he'd been in charge of United's government contracts (medicare, medicaid, VA) for fifteen years where - lemme speak from experience here - he was at the top of an organization that's no better or worse than the other seven companies we deal with that administrate Medicaid.

But again - you are so far up your own ass that shooting one of a dozen functionaries heading public corporations that you own stock in is somehow as virtuous as taking out the guy who orchestrated 9/11.

You're going to do me a favor. You're going to step away from the keyboard, you're going to walk into the bathroom, you're going to look at yourself in the mirror. You're going to make eye contact with yourself, so that you're really seeing yourself, and you're going to say "the assassination of an insurance CEO is every bit as virtuous and justified as the assassination of Osama bin Laden."

Then you're going to report back. How do you feel? Answer carefully because this might very well be the last exchange we ever have.

ALL of my post is saying "fukkit let's shoot a CEO is counterproductive" and you can't seem to get out of your own way to hear that the threshold for change is emphatically NOT "shooting people."

Look, bitch. You know what I do to feel better? I go pick up trash. I walk my neighborhood with an ikea bag and a grabber. 'cuz you know what? It's easy, it's free, and it's making the world a better place. Does the trash stay picked up? it does not. Does it solve the problem of trash? It does not. Does it discourage people from throwing shit out their window as they drive by? Negative. But it's a positive step, in the right direction, that improves things for everybody.

I guess I could go shoot a CEO instead but then I couldn't pick up trash anymore.

I'll ask this instead:

Do you see any path towards single payer healthcare / medicare for all?

Would you fucking listen if I did? Because I've talked myself blue in the face about single payer. Fuckin' the comment you're replying to is about single payer - our biggest leverage is "you reimburse us less than medicaid you monsters" and the best way to leverage that is to improve medicaid payouts. I'm profitable in a single payer ecosystem, that's one reason we seek out medicaid. You're three comments deep in what I'm up to, as an individual, but you're too busy talking past me so you can keep your pessimism close to your heart. Yep, nothing to do but go shoot a CEO.

Again, my sister wants to do things to protect forests and the environment. That is basically not a thing you can do.

If your threshold is "shoot a CEO" then "go volunteer for The Nature Conservancy" or some shit is hella below that. You see that, right? You see that there's a whole spectrum of shit that can be done this side of "shoot a CEO?"

I started like a week ago so like 11,000. My wife, who founded the team, is over a half million.

I play when I would be doomscrolling.

China is subsidizing the bejeesus out of electric cars, much like they subsidized the shit out of everything else. The reason Europe and North America have much lower penetration of electric cars is the same reason Hollywood makes mostly superhero movies: it's the only entertainment economy that isn't supported by 70% or greater government subsidy. If you have to make money, you have to sell things people want to buy. Knock 70% off the price of a Ford Mustang and they'd sell like hotcakes too. Tesla? Tesla largely exists to launder carbon credits. It's subsidy of a different kind.

update: I am watching Fox & Friends this morning while I finish up my slides, it's been years since I freebased a Fox show live.

The median cable news viewer is 70 years old. I'ma show you one image that encapsulates the current media landscape. Are you ready?

Kathy Bates (76), pretending to be Andy Griffith (59 at the time), in a reheating of a 40-year-old show that nobody under 60 watched. Superbowl ads. Jewel of the Paramount crown. Except, of course, for everything Taylor Sheridan does, please god watch Harrison Ford in a cowboy hat we're spending $22m per episode.

So you can be mad about the current media landscape? But you gotta keep in mind - nobody is aging into Fox News. Nobody is aging into MSNBC. ZOMFG judge blocks Onion acquisition of InfoWars. Might as well go shoot a CEO.

Yeah, none of this makes too much sense. In related news, I saw four recent quotes from people who voted trump. I only read one. That was enough. People, voting people, generally have no idea about national politics. I know you think that's belittling and no I don't have to be an asshole to their faces but to put it nicely, I feel like underestimating confusion in today's political info environment is a huuuuuuge thing we're mostly all still doing.

I have no confusion about the political environment. It all makes total sense. Rural white voters have taken it in the ass since NAFTA and Democrats have increasingly become the party of social issues, which means they have nothing to offer rural white voters. Who are 75% of the hinterlands, those places given outsized power by the electoral college.

The problem in 2016 was that Clinton had no charisma and Trump did. The problem in 2024 was that prices had gone up and there's no solution to that. My principle beef is that any discussion that starts with "they know not what they do" ends with "so they will of course endorse every evil thing this administration wants to accomplish" and any attempt to get at the nuance of it has no chance of getting through your McFlurry of recrimination and it's fucking exhausting.

I play Wordscapes now. Fuckin' anagrams and butterflies, bitch. Because everyone's divine right to keep losing their shit no matter the conversation is too exhausting to bear. Meanwhile we're out here writin' laws and revising contracts and upping reimbursement but according to Spence, it's all a waste of time we should all get out there and start shooting CEOs.

You don't even see it, do you.

You are so far up your own ass, so high on your own supply, that there's nothing that will make you let go of your "might as well just go shoot a CEO" teddy bear.

Here's where this beatdown started: "What could he have done to improve the lots of healthcare for those with less access?" This is balanced against the task of "shoot a CEO." I'ma give you some chunks of my life so you can see stuff that doesn't involve "shoot a CEO."

- We now have a lobbyist on the payroll. Because inflation is up and payments are not which means to give our staff raises we go into the red. Which means the only way to improve sustainability is to improve reimbursement which means renegotiating every contract which means juice from the state legislature. Each and every one of those people is doing more to improve outcomes than shooting a CEO.

- I rebalance our "should we provide insurance" equation about every four to six months. Obamacare is good enough that depending on our staff's demographic makeup it either costs us between 40 and 70k extra not to bone the ones who work the least. "HOW DARE YOU NOT PROVIDE INSURANCE!" you say, because you don't pay any attention to anything except that which outrages you. I don't provide insurance because I have a bunch of women working 15-25 hours a week and pulling down $70k a year but every four months or so, I try. Fucking doing that is more useful than "shoot a CEO."

- My wife hardly practices anymore. Mostly she writes legislation these days, increasing access to low-impact healthcare facilities with lower expenses, greater outcomes and higher minority utilization than hospitals. Doing that is more useful than "shoot a CEO."

But let's talk about the fucking CEO, shall we.

- Because the first part of reimbursement is dealing with the local adjuster flak, and she has no power. We talk to her all the time, all dozens of her, spread across sixteen insurance companies, and none of their positions would change an iota if we shot their CEO.

- The local adjuster flak has a regional adjuster flak and they have a little bit of power. We try to get through to them, but that mostly involves leaning on friends within the corporate world who self-insure because they have more power than we do. None of them talk to CEOs.

- The regional adjuster flak is responsible to underwriting and they're insulated from everyone. They ultimately report to accounting, who couldn't give the first fuck about the CEO.

- Accounting ultimately puts together the annual report. It's all actuarial bullshit, after all but that annual report is what juices the stock. Because ultimately, it all goes back to the fucking shareholder. And they'll care for fifteen minutes, but not really, because let me show you just how fucked that situation is.

UnitedHealthcare total shares: 923m

UnitedHealthcare institutional ownership: 952m

UnitedHealthcare ETF ownership: 496

Just browsing that list, United is in my portfolio at least twice. Just knowing you have a job, I guarantee United is in your 401(k) somewhere. There's 70m people out there with 401(k)s and if they didn't own UnitedHealthcare their brokers would be malfeasant. We're talking about a corporation with 400,000 employees that's up 90% in the past five years.

And yeah. A whole lot of 'em are at "fuck yeah shoot the CEO." But fuckin'A, dude, I even put it in stark terms of "things that are more useful than shooting the CEO" and you still reefed back to "bu bu bu bu the only solution is violence." And whenever you are engaged on the subject that supposedly has your ire, you immediately change the subject as to why it's all hopeless because apparently the democrats just voted on something completely different so why should you be allowed to let go of your smug, self-satisified cynicism.

because you're spitting in the face of everyone who ever tried, asshole.

"World-changing" is "change the world." It's a new way of doing things that is so successful over old ways that the old ways are abandoned. Refrigeration changed groceries. Air conditioning changed geography. Here's an argument about how cell phones changed Africa, and how AI probably won't. Your argument boils down to "provides better search for my father-in-law" which, okay, hire him an assistant. What's that? An assistant is too expensive? Are you sure? Oh, I see. A research assistant won't be as fast. Okay, so now we're talking about incremental productivity gains.

Look. I'm so old I remember when women were secretaries. Watch a few scenes of Mad Men, that shit was real. Then typewriters were electric and... women were still secretaries. Then word processors came out and women suddenly had more time to do shit other than type. Slowly but surely you started to see an integration of women into the workplace, you started to see a rise in daycare standards, you started to see double-income families as the norm. The modern western world owes its existence to the word processor in many ways but I doubt you'd argue that word processors are world-changing. They're an incremental tool that was one of many aspects of computerization that led to the information age.

"Incremental productivity gains" for whom? The most reasonable argument is that LLMs might make that part of your job that you hate less arduous. Okay, great. That's a good thing. fuck yeah Wordstar. My mother used to compose tests for her biology students with a typewriter, a pair of scissors and a copy machine. She did it that way well past the point that word processors existed because she needed diagrams and diagrams in desktop publishing took a dozen years longer so word processors basically bypassed her but for a big chunk of academia they revolutionized things. They didn't give anyone any more free time, though, because the job is the job. If anything, word processors annihilated the mimeograph industry - you poor bastards will never know that particular smell of fresh purple ink and for that i feel sorry for you.

The real matter, however, is that word processing was equally useful to amateurs and professionals alike. i can write like hell and even I lean on spell-check. My daughter basically taught herself to spell by guessing at ways to get rid of the squiggly red line when she typed. Yay word-processing. But if you're a shitty writer and I'm a great writer, LLMs will allow you to crank out mediocre work nobody wants to read while it won't do a damn thing for me because I can crap out better stuff than it can without pausing to sip my coffee. Oh, but that's gonna save the bad writers hours of time. Okay? But who cares? If nobody wanted to read it anyway why does it exist? Bloomberg has had AIs writing finance stories since 2018; that's because the articles are all written for sentiment bots doing high frequency trading anyway and it doesn't fucking matter.

How can you both believe NFTs are already changing the world when the largest use case is improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands through destroying their grey market, yet not seeing LLMs make a dent in the universe?

Because luxury goods are used to evade tariffs, embargoes and sanctions, as well as to provide untraceable bribes. Here's Imran Khan, going to prison over watches. Here's the government of Angola, falling over watches. Here's Wired, arguing in 2020 that this shit is about to be over and here's Rolex, hopping on the blockchain.

"Improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands" is one thing. "locking off a major portion of the shadow economy" is quite another.

LLMs - make it easier for mediocre writers to churn out copy, make it easier for mediocre coders to churn out programming

NFTs - make it harder to bribe governments

Has that sharpened your thinking?

Speaking as a mechanical engineer who spent a lot of time in the biomedical industry, followed by a lot of time in architecture, followed by a lot of time in entertainment:

I threw myself 80 hours a week for three years at building a healthcare facility that serves 33% medicaid and employs roughly 80% minorities because representation is the most effective method of affirmative action.

And you know what? I:

- didn't grow up with millions

- or go to Penn

- or have the luxury of joining a commune on Oahu where I could break my back surfing

Or, I mean, here. You tell me, Spence. What could this guy have done.

If my grandparents owned nine fucking skilled nursing facilities? I'd maybe try working within the system. Particularly if I had been exposed to the way it gives short shrift to individuals on the client side. But then, I don't look at the world as if it existed largely to inconvenience my hopeless ass.

Do me a solid. Take that learned, impotent helplessness of yours and fucking do something about it in 2025, mmmmmkay? Because given a choice between "throwing your life away in violence" and "anything else" the points go to "anything else" and the fact that this is difficult for you is why ISIS is almost entirely Europeans off on a jaunt.

Just another TESCREAL dipshit

TIRED: using your position of privilege and experience of pain to improve the lots of those with less access than you

WIRED: using your position of privilege and experience of pain for murder

Manhunt for UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Meets Unexpected Obstacle: Sympathy for the Gunman

UnitedHealth Backlash Signals Possible Shift in Washington and on Wall Street

But in the wake of the fatal shooting of a UnitedHealth Group executive, there has been an outpouring of negative public sentiment toward private insurers. “Remembering the day United Healthcare denied a one-night hospital stay for my 12yo child as ‘medically unnecessary’ following ASD heart repair surgery,” wrote one user on X. Another shared this: “Today I’m thinking about the time United Healthcare suddenly decided to stop paying for my chemotherapy and didn’t bother telling me.” A Facebook post from the company expressing sorrow over the killing of Brian Thompson, chief executive of the insurance unit, prompted more than 70,000 laugh emojis. “Thoughts and prior authorizations,” went a typical comment.

Joking about the murder of a human being—a husband and father—is deeply insensitive. The claims made about UnitedHealthcare by individuals on X haven’t been independently verified. And it should be needless to say that no one should face threats or violence, no matter how contentious the debate over health policy might be.

Yet the negative feelings on display toward health insurers can’t be ignored, including by policymakers, the companies themselves and their shareholders. At the very least, they underscore the widespread anger over the perceived dysfunction of the American healthcare system, and expose it as even more deep-seated than how it previously might have been understood. In recent years, insurers have been accused of denying coverage to protect their profit margins, a criticism that the killer seemingly alluded to with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” scrawled with a permanent marker on bullet casings found outside the Midtown Hilton.