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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2024

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  • If anything, China and Russia have shown that having unclear laws and lines are far more effective than clear-cut rules, because when you don’t know where the line is, you self-police to a degree more than the state would otherwise do. It doesn’t work on dogs because they aren’t intelligent enough to understand. It DOES work on humans because we get it.

    Vigilantes can’t get them all or probably even many of them.

    That would depend on how popular a movement it becomes, hmm? It certainly worked for the IRA.



  • The idea that punishment works is for the most part an authoritarian fantasy, not reality

    The idea that punishment works is the concept behind our entire justice system, and most of society.

    Probably because the insurance companies they compete with are bound by the same (specific, predictable, law-based) rules prohibiting that behavior. Probably not because they are afraid of angry customers with guns.

    You seem to have missed the point. You claimed that ‘the risk factor is simply working in that industry at all’. I’m pointing out that the industry does not inherently have any risk factor, and it’s entirely possible to be in the industry without murdering tens of thousands of people. The rest of the world manages to do it. The risk factor would be deciding to screw your customers over.


  • This is why there won’t be; you will just get harder corpos.

    You’re postulating one possible (and in my mind, unlikely) outcome. I’m pointing out that the usual and straightforward result of threatening punishment is that people stop doing the activity (or at least rethink it).

    It’s necessary because what if the risk factor is simply working in that industry at all, because of all the people fucked over by it? If regardless of their actual efforts to improve the humanitarian situation

    It’s 2024. Stats and numbers are publicly available and easily searchable on the internet. UHC had double the industry average rejection rate. And the CEO had been in charge for long enough that if he had wanted to make changes, he could have. There’s no ‘hypothetical’ scenario here.

    It’s weird how only in the US is it necessary for insurance companies to fuck their customers over to survive. I wonder why insurance companies in the rest of the world can survive without fucking their customers over? I suppose it’s a puzzle we’ll never solve.




  • Using threat of punishment to motivate behavior is extremely unstable even in the tightest, simplest circumstances

    Isn’t that our entire justice system?

    You simply can’t coerce a class of people with targeted assassinations. It’s too loose, too abstract, to unstable as a mechanism of control.

    On what basis? Nobody’s ever tried it, so it’s not like you have data to point to that says otherwise.



  • where the system selects its leaders based on their willingness to not only do violence to others but also sacrifice their own safety and wellbeing for power

    The system already chooses leaders based on their willingness to do violence to others, so I don’t see any downside if they decide to start sacrificing their safety and wellbeing.

    And all that is assuming that would-be assassins are in general coherent and reactive to the relative badness of corporate leaders and credibly applying danger relative to harm caused

    That’s not strictly necessary, as long as there’s a general trend of risk increasing along with harm done.


  • Nobody’s expecting them to become more introspective and sympathetic. Unlike fines and regulations, which can be passed off as the cost of doing business, threats to their life carries the risk of succeeding no matter what measures are taken. And the cost of such is not something that can be compensated for with money. Hence at some point simple profit / loss analysis will require them to consider not pissing off the public too badly




  • the broad strategic decisions made by the executives aren’t going to factor in a remote likelihood of violence on a particular executive.

    The key word there is ‘remote likelihood’. My point was that if it goes from ‘remote’ to ‘possible’ or ‘likely’, then it will start getting factored into decision making.

    what’s another life of a colleague, versus an insurance beneficiary?

    There’s a difference once they start considering their own lifes on the line.

    They’ll just beef up personal security, put the cost of that security into their operating expenses

    Unlike fines, which can be passed off as a cost of doing business, their lives are irreplaceable. And once the logic has been hammered into their heads, it can start influencing their decisions.


  • insurance is a mess and I am sure this guy was a dick, and that UHC denies plenty of claims that should be accepted. But at risk of pointing out the obvious, an insurance company that never denies any claims will go bankrupt immediately, and would therefore result in many more deaths since nobody would be covered.

    Insurance companies in other countries survive just fine by paying out what they are expected to. Only in America is insurance as screwed up as it is.