This event smacks of different things, in no particular order: cartel assassinations of unfriendly court officials and LEOs. Bombings and assassinations by Anarchists in the early 20th century. Weathermen and FALN attacks.
So the words 'Deny' 'Defend' and 'Depose' were inscribed on the shell casings. Hrm.
Deny, defend and depose are common terms in litigation over a denial of insurance coverage. "Deny" a claim, be it medical coverage, auto accident or homeowner. "Defend" the lawsuit if the policyholder hires a lawyer. "Depose" the claimant to get to a mediated settlement. It works the same way whether you are looking at a $5,000 flood claim or a $5 billion commercial claim.
NYC is going back to the 80s in more ways than one...
Kind of sad as a 90s kid who grew up in Jersey and going into the city with my dad for work, or just for fun. Never saw the 80s, but heard all about it and this may turn out to be worse because this time everyone is trying to deny it.
I remember the 80s in the City. I used to go with my dad into town also, and - if he street-parked - he'd pay some local guy on a stoop $10 to "keep the kids away" from our car.
Went to a blackhawks game in chicago with my dad 25 years ago. The stadium is just north of the bad side of town. “Dad you should probably give the guy offering to watch the car a few bucks”
Certainly not in Philadelphia and I can only assume they like it that way. Aside from the spontaneous shootouts over a parking spot or trash placement at the curb or retaliation for dissing at a takeout joint, there have been multiple targeted shootings this year where two or more shooters drive up or are lying in wait for the victim, one at a bus stop letting off students. Larry Krasner, the Soros supported DA took a stated position in 2018 to not to prosecute illegal gun possession and was reelected anyway. Apparently one needs to actually use the gun in a crime to be charged with possession. One of my friends was robbed at gunpoint in front of his house at Noon in South Philly last year.
I can’t find it now, but in the past year or two there was another that looked pretty well organized. Two guys exited a Jeep XJ at a gas station, fired upon a guy, and left. My description isn’t doing it justice, but the guys appeared to be fairly disciplined.
That was the targeted murder of Aaron Danielson by antifa communist Michael Reinoehl.
It was a pretty clean operation all things considered and to this date I have not heard of even a single other person, from the film crew to the cleanup crew that rushed the scene & collected shell casings getting picked up (much less tried.)
(For those unfamiliar, here is a slow moving and gratuitiously detailed AAR. There used to be a succinct and clean one but Susan "TurboCancer-on-Society" Wojcicki banned the AAR films which clearly evince the premeditated nature of the murder.
According to UHM employees, this dude was also the incorrect person to hit as he was more pro humane policy coverage. He will be replaced by a more evil lizard.
Or at least a pay bump... I was surprised that was the public number too given the size of the business. Who knows what else was happening behind the scenes that may have tied to this. Like Will said, this seems like a hit from a pro.
In a scenario like American Healthcare, the evil starts so high up it's unclear who to hit. Lobbyists are almost always scoundrels but even they are just prostitutes who want to be able to have a nice house & private school the kids in DC. In this case, a vigilante justice-seeker ought to be looking for someone else---someone either higher or lower
The market sets the price, and all the information is public.
I once sat in a client’s strategic planning session - a week of doing free work and sweating in Naples, FL during August - with the board. The CEO and the PE guys on the board spent an entire day negotiating his comp / incentive package. At one point the CEO said “if I don’t get at least to the 75th percentile of the peer group [adjusted for size and profitability] I might as well stay in bed every day.”
He got what he wanted and eventually they sold the business, 6 years later 😂
Starting on page 31, in nauseating detail, UnitedHealth goes through the components of the $23MM pay.
86% of the comp is non-cash and subject to forfeiture. The $23MM value comes from an estimation of the fair value on the grant date of the options.
Questioning the role of comp consultants and the inherent conflict (and desire to keep collecting fees) they present certainly is fair. You're not going to hire someone that says you should be paid less, and data supports this conclusion.
I worked with someone who developed tax-deferred comp plans that cost more in fees than they'd ever save in taxes, but the people who benefitted could expense the legal fees to the company. When you're selling a service, it's the name of the game.
More appropriate 20 Mil? Honestly, do you think one man could be worth that much for a years worth of work? I cant really see it being justified.
I have an idea for a reality tv show called "undercover executive assistant" where the assistant wears a hidden camera and show just how little someone who makes that much money a year actually does. I'm fairly certain they don't do much but I really don't know.
As I have offered elsewhere in this thread, $20MM+ total comp is sort of the going rate for the CEO of a Fortune ~100 company. If you get hired to do a job like that, you’re insulted if you’re asked to do it for less than the going rate.
The portion of that total comp that is cash varies, but is usually a few million dollars.
The rest of the comp will depend - over time - on how the company performs, what KPIs (the ultimate KPI is share price, which theoretically incorporates all others) are hit at what thresholds, etc.
The “work” is not working at the coalface or necessarily being in the office constantly or consistently. There are some aspects of work that can seem fun or glamorous, but they get old over time:
Do you really want to have a 2-3 hour blow it out dinner (typically involving alcohol) in a steakhouse or other fancy restaurant (with someone you don’t really know or even necessarily like) 10x+ a month?
Do you want to live out of a suitcase 100+ days a year?
Do you want to spend your weekends in a futile attempt to keep up with all of your professional responsibilities (i.e., neglecting family obligations)?
Ngl, saw the video and was shocked dude had to keep re-racking the slide on a suppressed pistol. Man was a pro considering he was so calm. Any jam would have thrown someone who was "novice"
What murder charge? If you're doing it right, you're not getting caught. No one takes a contract expecting to 1) get caught or 2) die. All those movies with the highly paid assassin sniper are just movies. Contract killings are not all that expensive. And if they're being done for 'personal reasons'? Then they're often done for free.
My money is on a troon denied coverage to have his frank and beans snipped (or added). There has been a spate of them going bonkers lately....Covenant, Uvalde.
The fact the shooter knew his itinerary and was waiting screams personal knowledge. The fact Thompson was not staying where he was delivering the speech or there earlier says a lot too.
Even the executives at little old Nationwide have separate entrances and escorts.
Seems too professional to have been done by the wronged party themselves. But considering how many people UHC has no doubt thrown under the bus, ONE OF THEM likely knew a guy...
Gotta say, in the limited # of rounds I've put through pistols, jams are fairly infrequent, and I've never encountered one with a striker fired pistol. Would subsonic ammo or suppressor use make it worse?
Certain types of ammo in certain pistols jams fairly regularly. Usually if you get one jam, you're likely to soon get another one, because something isn't quite right with either the ammo, the magazine, or the feed ramp.
I've never noticed any real difference between striker & hammer fired pistols.
I -do- think the pistol in used in this was not a semi-auto, that it needed to be cocked for each shot.
Subsonic ammo will make it harder for certain pistols to cycle. Subsonic ammo however is not common in 9mm. I've never seen it for sale myself.
I have been shot at with suppressed regular ammo and sub-sonic ammo, (long story not telling it). The gains you would get from using sub-sonic just isn't going to be much of a factor here. But the minuses are significant. I honestly doubt that other than the one guy in the doorway, nobody heard the rounds going through the air. Hell, he may not have even heard them. It's noisy in NYC, and people are very likely to 'fill in memories' after a traumatic event about what happened.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and what is learned. This person knew what they were doing and never panicked from what I could see.
Most, if not all, 147 grain 9mm is subsonic. May not say so on the box, but it’s leaving the muzzle at 950-1000 fps from a pistol barrel, which is slower than the speed of sound. I think buffalo bore and underwood load a 147 hard cast that’s approaching supersonic, but those are the exception, not the norm.
Nearly all 45 ACP is subsonic, with the exception of some specialty ammo with extremely light-for-caliber bullets.
For people more knowledgeable about guns, what would cause a pistol (of whatever type) to cycle poorly under usage with a suppressor? Subsonic ammo not racking the slide back hard/fast/far enough??
In fact, if you watch the video, there's quite a bit of gas exiting the ejection port with each shot, which would be consistent with subsonic rounds failing to cycle the slide.
FWIW, my integrally suppressed 22LR won't cycle properly with subsonic rounds, but it's much quieter...to the point of not needing hearing protection.
Yeah, it's obvious that he was paid talent. The suppressor alone makes that clear. Those are not easy to get in this country without a huge legal paper trail.
He had his getaway all nice and planned and perfect. He looks like everyone else and once inside the part he can dump all that gear where it will never be found, change his outfit, and be out of NYC and the state a half hour later.
My dad's buddy was a retired Navy machinist. He used to build suppressors on his lathe so he and the rest of the boys could shoot pistols on his basement range. To the best of my knowledge, never went any further than that, but it's not hard for someone with that skill set. Extremely Appalachian story, otherwise law abiding old dudes committing federal felonies to shoot guns and drink beer.
They are pretty easy to make, I may or may not have known a guy who may or may not have fabricated a cylindrical device that threaded onto a barrel of a Walther PPK. Allegedly you could only hear the slide cycle when firing it in Mexico.
Revolvers don't work well with suppressors, unless you can easily adjust the headspace down to 0. That makes them a little harder to use of course. The Dan Wesson was the favorite of the SAS when it used to go out and do that 'retired in the name of the Queen' thing.
There were live rounds from FTF’s as well as casings. He just knew his set up would have issues so he cleared the malfunctions like any half assed fire arms owner would do. The crime is his special gray man weird ass back pack that’ll narrow the suspect field down to a few thousand at the most. Dummy. Use a jansport.
What sucks is that a pair of hiking pants and trail runners is a Tier 1 comfortable outfit without looking like a complete slob. It’s like the male equivalent of yoga pants and Birkenstocks.
If it is, I am going to call its use foolish. Maybe not it worked. However for one thing he did not escape notice as he was caught on camera and regardless of how quiet a Welrod is, it will still cause commotion on a NYC street.
Second its rarity, almost especially if homemade, probably provides more vectors to tie it to the shooter than a suppressed, stolen Glock.
If the brass is clean, what does it matter if it is left behind? Hell unless you want to tie another homicide to this one, leave the gun.
In my alternate reality career in wetwork, I choose to keep things simple.
If it works, and it did, it's not foolish. I don't know if he kept the brass or not. Hard to tell from the video, but probably not. And it obviously didn't cause enough of a commotion.
I don't know if you have experience with suppressors or not (I do), they take away some of the noise, but a supersonic bullet is loud in its own right. Also we have no idea what kind of ammo he was using. Pre-fragmented anti-personnel rounds are a thing, and you can buy them, and they're pretty much a guaranteed kill shot with any torso hit.
As for the video, it's NY. Everything is on video. There are people everywhere. With cameras. So he (or she) dressed for the occasion.
As for rarity, I have no idea how many were made, but you can buy them. Which means you can also steal them.
"Pre-fragmented anti-personnel rounds are a thing, and you can buy them, and they're pretty much a guaranteed kill shot with any torso hit."
In real life, they don't penetrate deep enough to reliably cause you to bleed out. Hit a rib with one, you might not even get deep enough to collapse a lung. Hell, hit someone in the back with one, you might not even get deep enough to hit a rib--the back muscles are surprisingly durable.
It's not the bleed out. Bleed out isn't a good way to be sure someone or something dies. They cause serious internal damage and often destroy either the heart, or a major artery in that area. I don't know if they still use them, but the DEA used to swear by 'em. They're expensive though, a couple of dollars a round.
Obviously very hypothetical here. He was the paid assassin and I am not.
My experience with suppressors is that I am still very glad I am using hearing protection when I have shot with them, recreationally at a range. The pistols were not mine, but I did not experience any malfunctions while shooting them. My shooting interest do not lay in a direction that I have ever considered purchasing one.
The anti personnel rounds would have been equally effective from another pistol.
If it was a Welrod, and I sure can't tell anything looking at pictures on my phone so I 100% believe you that it was, and we are giving LE a lot of credit for trying to solve this, there are a far fewer Welrods, stolen or otherwise, to follow up on than less obscure firearms. The foolishness will come if using such an unusual item helps in anyway to track down the shooter.
It's 100% not a Welrod. He's using the standard hand position for racking a semi-auto slide; the Welrod uses a rotary bolt at the back of the pistol. So there's that.
this must be about the same ai thats going to replace us right
actually what if the 90 percent error rate is by design so that that can profit more than they would be able to relative to people making those decisions by hiding behind the fact that it was an ai program that did it
"in the Red Bull wouldn’t be a strong 2nd place in this year’s championship"
pick literally anyone and youd be right nearly every time
also is the radical black because squid ink is black
The sad reality is they don't care. They'll replace you with an AI with a 90% error rate. They'll send the job to incompetent people overseas because they don't care if your customer service experience is awful if it saves them ten cents
Far more likely that it is a pissed off shareholder than a patient, Americans haven't taken on business since the Battle of Matewan. That or some Epstein type shit.
I think patient over shareholder, someone's life/family could've been ruined and they snapped. Clearly the guy had some sort of training though, so I'm with the other type shit being a decent possibility too
When I was on my weeklong “vacation” in Naples, FL about 10 years ago (detailed elsewhere in this thread), the client volunteered to pick up our expenses, thinking this was some magnanimous gesture to the deal team (obviously we would’ve expensed this internally otherwise).
We were staying at the Ritz. They had a modest selection of cigars in the bar area, including a partial box of Opus X Perfexcion No. 2s, my favorite Opus X size. My boss asked me what they cost in Atlanta - $18 apiece at the time. At the Ritz, they were $88 apiece.
One night after dinner (during which the four members of the deal team ordered so much food the restaurant staff had to set up an “overflow” table for additional appetizers), he told the bartender: “We’ll all start with doubles of whatever your most expensive Macallan scotch is, and we’ll take all of those Opus whatever cigars.”
Where is the highest density of American institutional investors’ headquarters or significant offices? Within walking distance of the crime scene.
For any (potential) investors who decided to fly into NYC for the event, there are numerous (endless, really) opportunities to piggyback meetings with other people in the city, unparalleled dining choices, Christmas shopping (wives often attend this sort of thing if traveling in - free trip), etc.
I was once bizarrely upgraded to a suite at the Palace on a work trip to NYC in ~2018. It had to have been 2,500 sq feet and featured spectacular views.
The only mega suite I have stayed in was a Sheraton in India in Gujarat. It was enormous and not expensive. For background, Gujarat India is dry (no alcohol) and the majority of locals are vegetarians, so their KFC branches do not sell chicken. I don’t recommend travel to India ever, for any reason, yet I end up there about once a year.
I like the people I work with there. We are exporting, not outsourcing, so a good situation.
India is very much a sensory extreme situation. Everything is loud. Tons of people everywhere all the time. Riding in any vehicle is risking death. The food is activity trying to kill you. It is a very uncomfortable place for a westerner.
Unlikely. However, the American hotels in India are great. There are none (or very limited) at moderate price. You have a couple Hiltons, Conrad’s, JW M, and then Hyatt, Sheraton and up. They are fortresses/palaces, as there were terrorism issues in the past. And, most critically, the high end hotels are safe to eat at.
Same here except in Dallas. Presidential suite which they apparently upgraded to the 100th person checking in when not in use. Probably about the same size. No real view, though.
It was a little awkward as I was traveling with a client who was checking in right behind me. Fortunately I had known him from the Beatrice days mentioned elsewhere. I offered it to him but he good naturedly declined. Did business with him for another decade.
I recall once flying back from a conference (Delta flight NYC to ATL).
My boss (IB MD) had been upgraded to first class. One of our clients (regional bank CEO) boarded and headed for coach; boss leapt up to give that guy his seat, naturally.
Then that client sold itself without our help a year later!
At the police press conference they said they shooter was laying in wait at the conference hotel and shot him as he approached the hotel, so he likely was staying someplace else.
'Was this the first in a tidal wave of violent action taken to hold executives directly accountable for the behaviors that enrich, elevate, and separate them? '
0. I honestly don't care that they were using AI to deny claims. My wife has worked for insurance and doctors offices for over a decade, and honestly much of what goes on from both sides is employees wanting too much money for jobs that can either be automated or eliminated all together. Done right, much of what goes on at both doctors offices and at the insurance companies is purely wasteful, and could potentially save customers money. It's the same reason McD's is using kiosks. Its somehow different because it's insurance instead? I'm not buying it.
Caveat: United Healthcare is a for profit insurance company. Many insurance companies are not for profit or limited, like where my wife worked. There is no guarantee that any money saved by automation would get passed to the customer at a for profit insurance company. Also keep in mind that auto insurance claims are also becoming increasingly automated( possibly even using AI).
1. I also could care less about these people's pay. Different topic, but we have a judge in Delaware deciding on what compensation should Elon Musk make, even thought the board has on multiple occasions what that compensation should be.
2. I think there is a fair argument that no medical insurance company should be for profit. I think that is a conversation that SHOULD have been had before the government forced everyone to have insurance. No one asked this question either when states started forcing everyone to have auto insurance as well. Law of unintended consequences.
Not-for profit does not mean significant profit. Our health systems are non-profit (excluding Tenet) and most of which want to increase profit and margin. Mayo Clinic is that same designation, yet they bring in about $16Billion in revenue. Kaiser does 10x more revenue than Nvdia. Healthcare is broken, but not because of any one thing.
Non-profit health systems are worse, actually. WVU Medicine, for instance, is a “non-profit,” which mostly just allows them to exploit the DOJ’s policy of declining antitrust suits against nonprofits. They still make plenty, and get to have a monopoly too.
But "health systems" are very different than insurance. Everything about a not for profit insurance company is different than a not for profit hospital or health system.
Most not for profit hospitals in my area are partially state funded and are guided by the state as well, which means they can just be terrible when it comes to getting services, especially elective services.
I have heard stories about WVU Medicine that are shocking. They are very, very aggressive in nasty ways. Every state has multiple systems just like them too. Sutter in CA is one of the more well known egregious actors. They got caught destroying evidence in a whistleblower suit related to Medicare Advantage fraud just a couple years ago.
I work pretty much exclusively in the healthcare policy space when I’m not doing fundraising/campaign consulting. WVU Medicine is cutthroat and calculated to an immense degree. They even started an insurance company, I assume to test the limits of Stark Law or something.
Revenue isn't profit though. I'm confused by your statement.
My local state run non-profit hospital doubled its revenue over the last 3 years. But they've expanded services and purchased 3 other regional hospitals in that same course.
This only applies to the fully-insured portion of their business, which is a small portion of overall revenue. There is a reason insurers all bought PBM’s, Optum is the largest employer of physicians, etc.
One of the unintended consequences of the ACA is massive diversification of revenue streams by the BUCAH insurance companies over the last 15 years to sources that don’t count under the MLR calculation that is the cap I assume you’re referencing. You should see the massively outsized margin contribution Optum Rx makes to United Health Group’s overall income.
Solid points. There’s a longer discussion plus some of the work I did in trying to create a price war in the pharmacy space. Non profit systems, if they can get together, could break pbms
The work that Civica has done is a good example of what you’re talking about in the pharmacy space.
I wish more of the smaller regional systems would really step up to work together to directly contract with employers. This would be a huge win for everyone who creates or receives value, but it’s a slog nowadays to get this contracting in place one by one.
It’s honestly funny watching the complaints about the ACA from the exact same people who were defending the Aca. It’s been shit for more than ten years. Oh well.
Ya, it was never about controlling cost, more about coverage. It has succeeded on that front at the expense of even faster cost growth.
There are so many wonky elements of the ACA that never make it into the public discourse. Some are unintended consequences like I described above and some are things that have actually led to some improvements (like surgical bundles becoming more common and some of the learnings from the pioneer ACO programs).
I had this same discussion with a friend. His excuse was that our state didn't buy into the additional medicaid/medicare that some states did. Even if the state did actually do those things, that wouldn't have any effect on our insurance rates and medical costs.
United Health only made 6 percent net profit in 2023 even though their revenue was up 15 percent.
What does that mean? Premiums went up and so did their medical payments.
The not for profit health insurance company my wife worked for had a 3.5 percent net profit, which went back to their reserves because they are short millions in reserves ( which started in 2012 ).
In trying not to give away too much of who I am, I have worked for a non-profit health system(s) and the attempt to create more margin and more profit for health systems remains quite strong. There are ways to do this and most are striving for greater margin because margin sits at 1% - 3% if they're a good system rural systems tend to be in trouble, hence the consolidation. I don't know Mayo's net profit related to their revenue, but can tell you that for how many locations they have vs revenue, it's large and probably shouldn't have that status considering all the ways they do make money.
My point is more that non-profit, just doesn't mean they aren't trying to make as much profit as possible, but can be more flexible in service lines. There's a lot of money being spent in healthcare, just not a lot of money being made and many hide behind the non-profit status and fall well short of their charitable requirement.
I think that’s easy to say until you re at the butt end of the health care and running out of options. I can guarantee that your doctor will care more about you getting what you need than your insurance company even if you’ve been paying them for 50 years. The reason why venture capital is so successful in buying out the healthcare system is that being a private practice physician is financially challenging for most meanwhile insurance companies don’t seem to be having any trouble with their margins. I’ll get off my soapbox now
Here and there in the historical record one finds tales of payment in the form of live chicken, prior to the creation of Blue Cross. I can't blame the physicians.
Rewind 50-60 years ago. How would someone afford it then?
I would agree that basic and even possibly advanced medical care pre-medical insurance was probably on the whole cheaper. I have to imagine though that there were treatments or therapeutics that were simply unaffordable to the average person.
Of course health care was cheaper, there were plenty of treatments that didn't exist. Paying for a nurse to stare at 5 heart attack patients for a few days in the ICU and give them aspirin was much cheaper than a single cardiac cath. ;)
Especially back then, when a tiny portion of RNs would have had a BSN and they were paid pretty poorly, so the main reason to go into nursing was to have a better chance of marrying a doctor. Now RNs get paid well enough that even men will go to nursing school.
As a general proposition, non-profit insurance companies and health systems are tax evasion scams. I run a company in the employer health plan space that happens to be at the center of a bunch of transformation going on, so get to see a bunch of behind- the-scenes stuff. Their behavior is certainly no better than the for profit companies and is often worse.
My favorite people to talk to are slightly intoxicated former executives of major healthcare orgs. We’ve found out some crazy things. For example, some non-profit health systems are the largest land owners in the counties in their service areas because they have to hide the money somewhere. Their financials aren’t subject to GAAP or other oversight (e.g., shareholders). This lets them move money around between their entities in ways that would make the Enron guys blush.
I’m no fan of the for profit companies either, but they’re all the same.
That’s what I’ve heard from friends that do audits. Lots of shady practices that would never fly with a publicly traded company in any other industry. My understanding is even if they’re audited, they’re not required to follow GAAP, so lots of weird stuff sneaks in.
All the financial level shenanigans is in addition to the insane operational inefficiencies that exist on the ground. The fact that a lot of hospitals have more admin/support folks than clinicians is still insane to me after years in the space.
It’s a different framework. Im more on the tax side than the audit side but the stuff that public companies get away with can also be egregious. I worked for one of them. We do small size nfp so they’re typically underfunded and short on talent and employees. The ones we do arent corrupt. At least not obviously so.
Ya, the small NFP provider orgs tend to be the “good guys” because they could have sold out years ago, but have generally tried to stay independent so they can provide the best care at reasonable prices.
My comments aren’t meant to let the large publicly traded folks off the hook. They’re awful as well. I know of scenarios where large carriers make more on a claim than the care provider because of spread pricing between what they pay the provider and what the employer pays. It’s nasty stuff.
Overall there are lots of good people in all sorts of orgs, but are stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.
Lots of folks across the interwebs blame CEO pay on shareholders demand for stock performance. But public companies have different standards to operate under.
That’s a hard question to answer. I don’t think it’s a binary thing. The profit motive is a big issue, but that exists regardless of whether the entities are non-profit or not, publicly traded or not. These are complex, systemic problems.
The big thing lacking that my company focuses on and where I have the most knowledge is the general lack of backbone and sophistication on the part of employers and unions when purchasing healthcare and building their health plans. If they were better at that as a whole, there would be a lot more push back on bad behavior across hospitals, insurers, PBM’s, etc.
There is a lot of focus right now on fiduciary duties that employers have related to how they spend money for health benefits and this seems to be waking them up to be better stewards of the money. I’m cautiously optimistic about this. J&J, Wells Fargo, and others have had breach of fiduciary duty related lawsuits brought against them in the last year. I know of around 20 other similar lawsuits in the works too.
This, anecdotally, wasn't the case where my wife worked. I don't know about all states . Could the company launder money through paying high money to execs? Sure. The state required that excesses had to get put into reserves. How often did the state audit them? I don't know. What I can say is their claims and processing is so antiquated that there is huge waste in employees doing the jobs that can easily be automated.
Did Obamacare prop up the insurance companies long term? Absolutely. We all knew it would.
Short term though many insurance companies were losing money though.
Everyone wants to blame insurance companies and in some cases they rightfully should.
But WE, the consumers, forced the medical fields hand ~40 years go. Insurance wasn't really a thing until employees and unions started demanding insurance as a benefit for working for an employer. Hospitals and Doctors were forced to start taking it.
A number of Hospitals in the 80's started closing because they were too small and didn't want to deal with insurance ( this happened in several large cities in Florida). Bigger hospitals were accepting it and dealing with it, then they got bigger even creating more of a local monopoly on healthcare.
Fast forward and we vote for President who just hands the keys over to insurance companies.
The ACA didn't do what it said on the tin and distorted the market such that insurance and healthcare cartels are booming and the middle class is getting crushed.
I believe we live in a corrupt country - we're just materially well off enough not to notice most of the time. ACA and its fallout is one of the prime examples in my mind.
I've always believed corruption exists, but the American spirit of publishing everything and squealing for 15 minutes of fame reduces the length of that corruption and thus can be remedied. Term limits for all.
"Not for Profit" just means the excess cash gets thrown into bloated exec headcount and comp, frivolous capex (looking at you Cleveland Clinic), and misguided acquisitions.
I don't know about every insurance company, but in the state that I live and the insurance company my wife worked for, it didn't work that way. Did the CEO make good money? Sure.
The insurance company she worked for, very large within the state, lost money for several straight years due to Obamacare. They are/were required to keep reserves, and they were almost depleted. When they had excesses in 2016, they had to put the extra money into the reserves.
Two kids lost their Dad. Yeah, there are probably scores of kids who lost their parent due to United Healthcare. But my heart still goes out to those kids.
Thanks for background on the squid, Jack. Not that you asked, but I think the current iteration is lacking character and would benefit from at least a bit of the original Squidco hand drawn look to it.
Yuki definitely deserves it (or a shot to replace one of the other moving drivers), but we'll see what happens. I'm also interested to see how Sainz gets on at Williams
They shouldn't even let Checo drive a golf cart IMO. Sending him to VCARB just throws away a slot that could go to someone with actual promise. I had the same issue sending Ricky there.
Doing logos is hard. I tried for ages to come up with one, then one of my fans handed me this one (which I've since trademarked) for free! All he wanted was for me to name a ship in one of the series after his mom. (I also gave him a bunch of paperbacks).
I see way too many people who think that their FACE is a perfectly good logo (or album cover! UGH!! - Phil Collins gets a pass cause at least he was doing it ironically). It's surprising how quickly people will connect it to you. I also like the way it came about for you, it's a good story. Kids can be cruel, turning their cruelty back on them always burns them.
As an aside: What's a good brand of leisure shirts these days? When I left the tech/contract world I dumped all of my dress button up shirts. I've been wearing t-shirts (nice ones, but still t-shirts) ever since and I'm starting to miss wearing something nicer. So what brands would you recommend? (and no polo-shirts please, though Rugby shirts are fine).
Logos and branding are brutal. I've been in too many meetings going in circles until someone just says make a word mark and be done (although that just starts it all over again..)
What's a leisure shirt to you? Untucked button down with short sleeves?
During my entrepreneurship days, when I had 20/15 vision, I taped the Motorola batwing, the bitten Apple, and my candidate logo(s) to the side of the group mailbox at the condominium and viewed them from a distance.
I’ll say it if no one else will: I think T&A shirts are fairly ugly!
That is despite the fact that Chris Harris’s far more interesting friend Neil Clifford (Kurt Geiger CEO, former owner of the destroyed Bristol Fighter) is a director of the company.
My super clotheshorse friends who have been everywhere and tried it all now favor Luca Avitabile bespoke, even over Charvet.
I am tempted to try 100 Hands, even though they are from *shudders* India.
That's quite the dilemma unless we're talking the Rickenbacker or WWII era, in which case i will re-fold the switchblade and don the leather helmet and goggles.
For casual (truly casual, & cheap) Jcrew makes an acceptable shirt, and Gustin makes a good shirt if your body is proportioned for their fit.
If you need to conceal, something made to be left untucked (I wouldn't recommend Untuckit, but many shirt makers now offer a shirt cut to be worn un-tucked and this would lower likelihood of printing.
But for anything even vaguely serious with buttons, the correct answer is just have some shirts made to order. Wherever you can get a local tailor to measure you and work with you to get you the fit you want, over time. The first shirts should be imperfect. It should take a few fittings and sewn shirts to get it perfect. A shirt should tolerate your wristwatch (or penchant to roll sleeves) (or large forearms from weightlifting). Subsequently, if you fall head-over-heels down the Alice Wonderland rabbithole, you can take those measurements or even shirts to someone like Turnbull or really any number of fine custom clothiers and ask them to replicate in their fabric with their craftsmen and their take on your goals.
There is no one answer here. If you need to sweat in the shirt, the LuLulemon Commission longsleeve makes sense but is almost like a button-down version of a polo shirt, if that makes sense.
Allow me to suggest blakemill.co.uk. They will ship to the US as I sent one to my nephew in California. I favour the plain white shirts with a bit of colour inside the collar for semi-formal use - it obviates the need for a tie (and who does that these days) but also avoids the dressed like a crow effect. And if you want to go loud, they have that well covered. You’re reasonably unlikely to meet anyone else in one at your local bbq…
Not casting aspersions, but be careful with the sizing - US “L” can translate to XL in the UK.
I’ve been 28, underemployed and working with those types - to include some from UnitedMedical, during my LTC medical field days. I met some people who I’d gladly uh ‘crowdfund against’. Can you really prosecute thousands of people if the money happened to be spent ambiguously and towards a dastardly and unforseen ending? I just figured they’d toilet paper his house or create some type of professional inconvenience…right. Right?
But I’ve names. Lots of spite too for being completely shit on for being poor and living in my equally crappy flyover Ohio town. I’ll kick extra to promise some third party immolation.
This is to the best of my knowledge, and I do not think confidential in any way. I am fascinated by how AI can be of legitimate assistance with accurate billing and payments in healthcare.
My wife started with that CEO's company 7 months ago, and I am worried that she will either be replaced with AI, or her job will become supervising and defending AI decisions, although in the second case I could see how that would work and eliminate 75%, mostly nurses, who work in her department.
The best I can tell her department is not by design an evil one. There are standards of care the determine what can be charged for a service, specifically in her department if a hospital stay can be billed as an observation or something more. These standards are the same ones medicare/medicaid use. For either case various things need to be documented and submitted to insurance. The cases where the documentation is insufficient or does not match the charges are flagged, which doesn't require anything as complex as to be called "AI", the records are pulled and summarized by nurses, and then passed up to a physician who has many years of experience and possess various credentials for standards of care in hospital medicine. My apologies to any medical professionals who can state that more accurately.
The case is either approved for payment, or sent back with a request for more documentation, and finally a review with a physician at the facility that submits the claim who can make the case for a higher billing code. All of this seems like an eminently fair way of preventing billing fraud from the hospitals, and since it is an institution, there are no laypeople who can be duped.
I have to imagine that 90% of what I just described can be done with AI, reviewed by a human, who while not medically legally responsible is the authority on the matter, and re-submitted with an option of appealing. If it can't be, then LLM really is useless.
With any luck my wife will survive the inevitable culling and emerge a co-worker with our AI overlords. She certainly doesn't want to go back to clinical medicine.
"The cases where the documentation is insufficient or does not match the charges are flagged, which doesn't require anything as complex as to be called "AI", the records are pulled and summarized by nurses, and then passed up to a physician who has many years of experience and possess various credentials for standards of care in hospital medicine. My apologies to any medical professionals who can state that more accurately."
I think Propublica stated it "more accurately," which is to say denying claims based on an average of 1.2 seconds of review...which is 100% believable to literally anyone who has worked in health care and isn't completely oblivious. Yeah, AI could totally do that.
Talk to any physician who deals with rejected claims (I manage to avoid most of that in the ED, thankfully) and you'll find that every last one has a story about an appeal turned down by someone in a totally unrelated specialty.
In this case it involves at least two humans on the insurance end, and after the review significant amounts of documentation to support the conclusion, followed by, if appealed, a peer to peer conversation between two physicians. All of which is insanely expensive way of determining if something is documented to meet specific criteria set by a government organization.
This BS drives me particularly crazy - a perfect example of just pushing costs elsewhere. United might save "x" by using AI, but the total system costs might not shrink if a medical practice has to spend more money to deal with the mistakes. I've seen demos of software being peddled to doctors that basically promise to use AI to deal with insurance AI. SMFH.
"or her job will become supervising and defending AI decisions"
^ many of our jobs will become this. As the saying goes, "AI isn't coming for your job, but the person who can 'use' it better is."
AI is just the latest version of deploying a very promising tech in the laziest, most-shareholder-oriented way possible.
I am not saying there isn't a ton of BS in insurance, but what I am seeing and hearing since my wife works from home is more analogous to this.
Your under warranty car breaks down and gets towed to the nearest dealer.
The dealer submits a claim for a new engine and the labor on replacement, there are criteria for doing so.
Claim gets rejected because there is no documentation about why there needs to be a new engine and labor for replacement.
There is a phone call, the mechanic describes a how there is a big hole in the engine block from a broken rod.
Claims processor says "Great, take a picture of it, and the casting number like you are supposed to and re-submit"
So, for a human body. "Of course this is more than an observation, the patient was diabetic, in sepsis, and we had to amputate their foot"
"Great, put the documentation of that in the record and resubmit."
Medical care is a scarce good, and other than situations where an individual is paying 100% out of pocket those expenses are born by a larger group, either taxpayers or insurance premium payers. There has to be some accountability of how and why those resources are used. Billing fraud is rampant and it costs all of us money. These is an expectation that care is given on the basis of best practices and that those things are a matter of record.
There is ample evidence that documentation and records keeping are a major factor in physician burnout. Far more time is spent on that than what one would think of as actual patient care. But if it isn't done, no one gets paid and there aren't hospitals and doctors offices.
Yeah, I understand that and agree philosophically.
I guess my experience - using this analogy - is often more like an OEM that only reimburses for 1hr of warranty labor for "x," when the work clearly needs 1.5. And so the dealer does the 1hr and hopes the CEL doesn't return as you drive home. FCA loved doing this (ask me how I know).
United is my current insurer (but we're moving back to BCBS in Jan), and they've basically operated the same way for both my ENT and orthopedics work over the past 2 years.
In my one and only meeting with the CEO of a major insurance company, he made it very clear that he was offended by the entire concept of paying claims. He thought the only job of an insurance company was to accept premiums. (I've mentioned this here before.)
Darrow, one of those truly despicable villains that pre-collegiate schooling never dared dwell upon.
Teaching what the man's life really was and what the concrete effects of his actions ended up being really might chasten this country in a positive way.
This event smacks of different things, in no particular order: cartel assassinations of unfriendly court officials and LEOs. Bombings and assassinations by Anarchists in the early 20th century. Weathermen and FALN attacks.
So the words 'Deny' 'Defend' and 'Depose' were inscribed on the shell casings. Hrm.
"It's about sending a message".
Deny, defend and depose are common terms in litigation over a denial of insurance coverage. "Deny" a claim, be it medical coverage, auto accident or homeowner. "Defend" the lawsuit if the policyholder hires a lawyer. "Depose" the claimant to get to a mediated settlement. It works the same way whether you are looking at a $5,000 flood claim or a $5 billion commercial claim.
And very similar to the title of a 2010 book by Rutgers Law Professor Emeritus Jay Feinman: _Delay, Deny, Defend_.
To clarify, Brian Thompson was not THE big boss at United (that’s Andrew Witty, who earned a more appropriate $20MM+ per annum).
When I saw Thompson’s comp figure I felt doubly sorry for him.
Still a primetime hit, the dude was up to something. Haven't seen that since the mob years tbh.
NYC is going back to the 80s in more ways than one...
Kind of sad as a 90s kid who grew up in Jersey and going into the city with my dad for work, or just for fun. Never saw the 80s, but heard all about it and this may turn out to be worse because this time everyone is trying to deny it.
I remember the 80s in the City. I used to go with my dad into town also, and - if he street-parked - he'd pay some local guy on a stoop $10 to "keep the kids away" from our car.
And this was usually just N of Lincoln Center!
Went to a blackhawks game in chicago with my dad 25 years ago. The stadium is just north of the bad side of town. “Dad you should probably give the guy offering to watch the car a few bucks”
When I had season tickets we paid the local kids, the same ones all the time.
My mother got SHOT AT. Twice. In Brooklyn.
To be fair, both times she was wearing the uniform of a WAC Captain.*
* now I had heard the WACs recruited/lesbian and whores/but Mommy's neither one of those
Jesus...
Nor was she an old maid.
Good Christ on a golf cart!
twitter dipshit James Surowieki screaming at the people trying to rescuscitate an NYC gunshot victim: "Urban gun crime is DOWN! This is TRANSITORY!"
Certainly not in Philadelphia and I can only assume they like it that way. Aside from the spontaneous shootouts over a parking spot or trash placement at the curb or retaliation for dissing at a takeout joint, there have been multiple targeted shootings this year where two or more shooters drive up or are lying in wait for the victim, one at a bus stop letting off students. Larry Krasner, the Soros supported DA took a stated position in 2018 to not to prosecute illegal gun possession and was reelected anyway. Apparently one needs to actually use the gun in a crime to be charged with possession. One of my friends was robbed at gunpoint in front of his house at Noon in South Philly last year.
I don't go there anymore.
I can’t find it now, but in the past year or two there was another that looked pretty well organized. Two guys exited a Jeep XJ at a gas station, fired upon a guy, and left. My description isn’t doing it justice, but the guys appeared to be fairly disciplined.
That was the targeted murder of Aaron Danielson by antifa communist Michael Reinoehl.
It was a pretty clean operation all things considered and to this date I have not heard of even a single other person, from the film crew to the cleanup crew that rushed the scene & collected shell casings getting picked up (much less tried.)
(For those unfamiliar, here is a slow moving and gratuitiously detailed AAR. There used to be a succinct and clean one but Susan "TurboCancer-on-Society" Wojcicki banned the AAR films which clearly evince the premeditated nature of the murder.
https://rumble.com/vmc3xb-antifa-member-michael-reinoehls-murder-of-jay-danielson-of-patriot-prayer.-.html )
Wait - maybe you meant something else. The above was a WK2 GC
Different situation. This was two guys in broad daylight at a gas station in NY. Great breakdown though, thanks us for sharing.
There’s a couple DOJ investigations involving him. I wonder if someone really didn’t want him to talk.
According to UHM employees, this dude was also the incorrect person to hit as he was more pro humane policy coverage. He will be replaced by a more evil lizard.
The next guy will have to have hazard pay
Or at least a pay bump... I was surprised that was the public number too given the size of the business. Who knows what else was happening behind the scenes that may have tied to this. Like Will said, this seems like a hit from a pro.
The reason I would argue it doesn't is that the guy's face is captured on some video cameras... https://www.the-sun.com/news/13024277/united-healthcare-ceo-shot-brian-thompson-nyc-killed/
It's not inconceivable that they even got his retinas. Hope this guy has nothing to lose or plans to eat rice in Koh Samui until death
There are worse places to eat rice.
I'll take my chances for 10 million a year.
Ah, so an inside job. Couldn't find a way to fire him, I guess.
Stock is up $5.56 today....
holy shit
kill another one
i want to invest
I see what you did there, but I'm sure it's only up 45 cents.
Ha! I can't believe I copied that very appropriate number from Google without realizing its significance. Facepalm.
Can't seem to share the screenshot in this software though. Copy and paste:
610.79 USD +5.56 (0.92%)today
Closed: Dec 4, 7:32 PM EST • D
People should be shooting the lobbyists creating the muck, not the cogs of the machine the paid for government created.
In a scenario like American Healthcare, the evil starts so high up it's unclear who to hit. Lobbyists are almost always scoundrels but even they are just prostitutes who want to be able to have a nice house & private school the kids in DC. In this case, a vigilante justice-seeker ought to be looking for someone else---someone either higher or lower
20MM+ "appropriate"??? No.
His total comp is based on the company’s proxy peer group.
~$20MM all in is typical for a Fortune ~100 company CEO in a typical year.
If he were paid below the median of the peer group, the Board has incentivized him to deliver below par shareholder returns, which is insulting.
"average" and "appropriate" are not always the same thing.
The market sets the price, and all the information is public.
I once sat in a client’s strategic planning session - a week of doing free work and sweating in Naples, FL during August - with the board. The CEO and the PE guys on the board spent an entire day negotiating his comp / incentive package. At one point the CEO said “if I don’t get at least to the 75th percentile of the peer group [adjusted for size and profitability] I might as well stay in bed every day.”
He got what he wanted and eventually they sold the business, 6 years later 😂
No, the BOARD MEMBERS, who are OTHER CEOs ENGAGING IN RECIPROCITY, set the compensation. Warren Buffett has criticized this practice.
Not necessarily the case, at all.
In the anecdote I cite, it was adversarial, since PE owned roughly half of the company.
Was the company profitable under his management?
The entire peer group is massively overpaid.
Almost uniquely in the US compared to elsewhere.
Starting on page 31, in nauseating detail, UnitedHealth goes through the components of the $23MM pay.
86% of the comp is non-cash and subject to forfeiture. The $23MM value comes from an estimation of the fair value on the grant date of the options.
Questioning the role of comp consultants and the inherent conflict (and desire to keep collecting fees) they present certainly is fair. You're not going to hire someone that says you should be paid less, and data supports this conclusion.
I worked with someone who developed tax-deferred comp plans that cost more in fees than they'd ever save in taxes, but the people who benefitted could expense the legal fees to the company. When you're selling a service, it's the name of the game.
https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/investors/2024/2024_proxy_statement_final.pdf
https://publications.aaahq.org/accounting-review/article-abstract/95/1/311/4430/Compensation-Consultants-and-the-Level-Composition?redirectedFrom=fulltext
More appropriate 20 Mil? Honestly, do you think one man could be worth that much for a years worth of work? I cant really see it being justified.
I have an idea for a reality tv show called "undercover executive assistant" where the assistant wears a hidden camera and show just how little someone who makes that much money a year actually does. I'm fairly certain they don't do much but I really don't know.
As I have offered elsewhere in this thread, $20MM+ total comp is sort of the going rate for the CEO of a Fortune ~100 company. If you get hired to do a job like that, you’re insulted if you’re asked to do it for less than the going rate.
The portion of that total comp that is cash varies, but is usually a few million dollars.
The rest of the comp will depend - over time - on how the company performs, what KPIs (the ultimate KPI is share price, which theoretically incorporates all others) are hit at what thresholds, etc.
The “work” is not working at the coalface or necessarily being in the office constantly or consistently. There are some aspects of work that can seem fun or glamorous, but they get old over time:
Do you really want to have a 2-3 hour blow it out dinner (typically involving alcohol) in a steakhouse or other fancy restaurant (with someone you don’t really know or even necessarily like) 10x+ a month?
Do you want to live out of a suitcase 100+ days a year?
Do you want to spend your weekends in a futile attempt to keep up with all of your professional responsibilities (i.e., neglecting family obligations)?
See this from PMD: http://www.autoextremist.com/current/?currentPage=38
For better(yes) or worse(no), your story is part of his story.
You're not wrong!
I’m frequently wrong, but not about this. I have a feeling the ‘ol kraken will be nose art eventually.
Ngl, saw the video and was shocked dude had to keep re-racking the slide on a suppressed pistol. Man was a pro considering he was so calm. Any jam would have thrown someone who was "novice"
imagine how mad youd have to make someone for them to hire a competent hitman
I'm sure it's not someone mad at him (from the court cases, not necessarily something else).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Tzg0tTJ1Y
i use this whenever possible
In certain circles, not mad at all, as long as you can afford the price.
takes a lot to hit someone big. Even the mob didn't do it on a whim.
less than 10 grand
Experience? 10k for a murder charge? Nah, ain't the hood.
What murder charge? If you're doing it right, you're not getting caught. No one takes a contract expecting to 1) get caught or 2) die. All those movies with the highly paid assassin sniper are just movies. Contract killings are not all that expensive. And if they're being done for 'personal reasons'? Then they're often done for free.
this is terrifyingly affordable
can i use affirm to pay in installments
Don't want to miss one of those monthly payments, the interest is starts at the kneecaps and goes up from there.
It's not personal, it's just business.
He didn’t have a booster.
Hitman: “Time for your shots”
*pfft* *pfft*
time for Peter Hotez to get his!
I don't think a pro would go about business with tools he didn't know were spot on.
Maybe. But seen enough amateurs lose their shit over a jam.
My money is on a troon denied coverage to have his frank and beans snipped (or added). There has been a spate of them going bonkers lately....Covenant, Uvalde.
Too well planned and thought out to be one of them.
The fact the shooter knew his itinerary and was waiting screams personal knowledge. The fact Thompson was not staying where he was delivering the speech or there earlier says a lot too.
Even the executives at little old Nationwide have separate entrances and escorts.
I am thinking denied medical treatment of a wife or child.
Seems too professional to have been done by the wronged party themselves. But considering how many people UHC has no doubt thrown under the bus, ONE OF THEM likely knew a guy...
Plus one is under stress trying to commit a murder. wasn't his first time.
Gary Plauche
one shot
one kill
straight to the dome
there are special forces dudes that couldnt do that
Jams happen. They're a fact of life.
Gotta say, in the limited # of rounds I've put through pistols, jams are fairly infrequent, and I've never encountered one with a striker fired pistol. Would subsonic ammo or suppressor use make it worse?
Certain types of ammo in certain pistols jams fairly regularly. Usually if you get one jam, you're likely to soon get another one, because something isn't quite right with either the ammo, the magazine, or the feed ramp.
I've never noticed any real difference between striker & hammer fired pistols.
I -do- think the pistol in used in this was not a semi-auto, that it needed to be cocked for each shot.
Subsonic ammo will make it harder for certain pistols to cycle. Subsonic ammo however is not common in 9mm. I've never seen it for sale myself.
I have been shot at with suppressed regular ammo and sub-sonic ammo, (long story not telling it). The gains you would get from using sub-sonic just isn't going to be much of a factor here. But the minuses are significant. I honestly doubt that other than the one guy in the doorway, nobody heard the rounds going through the air. Hell, he may not have even heard them. It's noisy in NYC, and people are very likely to 'fill in memories' after a traumatic event about what happened.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and what is learned. This person knew what they were doing and never panicked from what I could see.
Most, if not all, 147 grain 9mm is subsonic. May not say so on the box, but it’s leaving the muzzle at 950-1000 fps from a pistol barrel, which is slower than the speed of sound. I think buffalo bore and underwood load a 147 hard cast that’s approaching supersonic, but those are the exception, not the norm.
Nearly all 45 ACP is subsonic, with the exception of some specialty ammo with extremely light-for-caliber bullets.
Never realized that. I always thought they were just a bit faster. Thanks for pointing that out on the 9mm
And yes, I know on the 45, but everyone's in love with 9mm these days.
For people more knowledgeable about guns, what would cause a pistol (of whatever type) to cycle poorly under usage with a suppressor? Subsonic ammo not racking the slide back hard/fast/far enough??
pretty much
that and hanging the weight of a suppressor off the end of a tilting barrel gun can make it harder to cycle properly
shouldnt be that big a deal on a straight blowback like a hipoint or whatever
In fact, if you watch the video, there's quite a bit of gas exiting the ejection port with each shot, which would be consistent with subsonic rounds failing to cycle the slide.
FWIW, my integrally suppressed 22LR won't cycle properly with subsonic rounds, but it's much quieter...to the point of not needing hearing protection.
Hell I don't think any 22LR needs hearing protection lol
We'll have to compare notes in 20 years. Possibly written, depending on your ears. :D
140 dB (typical rifle) and 157 dB (typical pistol) is more than I care to listen to without plugs or muffs.
If you’re outside plinking beer cans with a .22LR in a rifle, you’re probably OK. Indoor range is another story.
Yeah, it's obvious that he was paid talent. The suppressor alone makes that clear. Those are not easy to get in this country without a huge legal paper trail.
He had his getaway all nice and planned and perfect. He looks like everyone else and once inside the part he can dump all that gear where it will never be found, change his outfit, and be out of NYC and the state a half hour later.
'solvent trap'
The BATF has been going after those for ages. All the people selling that stuff these days are working for the BATF
Same is true for the 80% crowd, I'm afraid.
probably is now. Didn't use to be. If you can do business in cash with no ID, they're legit. If not, they ain't.
RIP P80.
My dad's buddy was a retired Navy machinist. He used to build suppressors on his lathe so he and the rest of the boys could shoot pistols on his basement range. To the best of my knowledge, never went any further than that, but it's not hard for someone with that skill set. Extremely Appalachian story, otherwise law abiding old dudes committing federal felonies to shoot guns and drink beer.
Sometimes it IS society's fault.
Hell, 90% of Prohibition moonshiners were just Uncle Jesse trying to keep Daisy, Bo and Luke fed.
Paid talent wouldn’t have let him lay there without a double tap
Again, movies. If they're dead, they're dead. Though from the video it looks like he shot the guy 3 times, not 2.
mozambique or nothing
They are pretty easy to make, I may or may not have known a guy who may or may not have fabricated a cylindrical device that threaded onto a barrel of a Walther PPK. Allegedly you could only hear the slide cycle when firing it in Mexico.
'oil filters' or for 'The Wire' fans, a potato.
It's also possible that the pistol was set up to require manual racking. Makes the suppressor and the pistol work more effectively.
To collect his brass as well?
This was my thought. Single shot is more accurate and you can collect the brass more easily.
welrod still taking names 80 years later
I finally found a good version of the video, and I think you're right. That DOES look like a welrod.
Forgotten Weapons says no
yeah it looks like a regular pistol
but itd be cooler if it was
Use a revolver. Doesn't eject brass. No evidence.
Revolvers don't work well with suppressors, unless you can easily adjust the headspace down to 0. That makes them a little harder to use of course. The Dan Wesson was the favorite of the SAS when it used to go out and do that 'retired in the name of the Queen' thing.
unless you have a nagant revolver which can be suppressed and is quiet but that uses hard to find and unique ammo never mind the gun itself
Dan Wessons do. Use one of them, if you've got the scratch.
Speculation I saw was subsonic ammo which wouldn’t cause enough kickback to cycle the pistol. A pro move.
I don't think I'd want to use subsonic ammo. It doesn't hit hard and it's often problematic. Especially in larger calibers.
Standard pressure loads of 45 ACP are inherently subsonic in pistol length barrels....
And I've watched match shooters run low pressure loads on a soft recoil spring where you could SEE the round go downrange out of a 1911.
It was pretty funny and within the (very few) rules of the private club match.
There were live rounds from FTF’s as well as casings. He just knew his set up would have issues so he cleared the malfunctions like any half assed fire arms owner would do. The crime is his special gray man weird ass back pack that’ll narrow the suspect field down to a few thousand at the most. Dummy. Use a jansport.
"special gray man weird ass back pack"
the idea of greyman specific products is almost baffling to me as the point is to look like every other dude out there
tough to do in a 5.11 hat and crye pants
You forgot the trail runners.
What sucks is that a pair of hiking pants and trail runners is a Tier 1 comfortable outfit without looking like a complete slob. It’s like the male equivalent of yoga pants and Birkenstocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZUYzzwZ57o&t=966s
stuff like this is completely normal looking too
Good video I’ll check it out. Thanks for sharing.
Straightedge style is perfect for carrying snacks around.
Imagine his embarrassment considering the shot placement and equipment malfunctions.
If he was using a welrod, it's a single shot pistol.
If it is, I am going to call its use foolish. Maybe not it worked. However for one thing he did not escape notice as he was caught on camera and regardless of how quiet a Welrod is, it will still cause commotion on a NYC street.
Second its rarity, almost especially if homemade, probably provides more vectors to tie it to the shooter than a suppressed, stolen Glock.
If the brass is clean, what does it matter if it is left behind? Hell unless you want to tie another homicide to this one, leave the gun.
In my alternate reality career in wetwork, I choose to keep things simple.
If it works, and it did, it's not foolish. I don't know if he kept the brass or not. Hard to tell from the video, but probably not. And it obviously didn't cause enough of a commotion.
I don't know if you have experience with suppressors or not (I do), they take away some of the noise, but a supersonic bullet is loud in its own right. Also we have no idea what kind of ammo he was using. Pre-fragmented anti-personnel rounds are a thing, and you can buy them, and they're pretty much a guaranteed kill shot with any torso hit.
As for the video, it's NY. Everything is on video. There are people everywhere. With cameras. So he (or she) dressed for the occasion.
As for rarity, I have no idea how many were made, but you can buy them. Which means you can also steal them.
"Pre-fragmented anti-personnel rounds are a thing, and you can buy them, and they're pretty much a guaranteed kill shot with any torso hit."
In real life, they don't penetrate deep enough to reliably cause you to bleed out. Hit a rib with one, you might not even get deep enough to collapse a lung. Hell, hit someone in the back with one, you might not even get deep enough to hit a rib--the back muscles are surprisingly durable.
It's not the bleed out. Bleed out isn't a good way to be sure someone or something dies. They cause serious internal damage and often destroy either the heart, or a major artery in that area. I don't know if they still use them, but the DEA used to swear by 'em. They're expensive though, a couple of dollars a round.
Flying ashtrays?
Obviously very hypothetical here. He was the paid assassin and I am not.
My experience with suppressors is that I am still very glad I am using hearing protection when I have shot with them, recreationally at a range. The pistols were not mine, but I did not experience any malfunctions while shooting them. My shooting interest do not lay in a direction that I have ever considered purchasing one.
The anti personnel rounds would have been equally effective from another pistol.
If it was a Welrod, and I sure can't tell anything looking at pictures on my phone so I 100% believe you that it was, and we are giving LE a lot of credit for trying to solve this, there are a far fewer Welrods, stolen or otherwise, to follow up on than less obscure firearms. The foolishness will come if using such an unusual item helps in anyway to track down the shooter.
It's 100% not a Welrod. He's using the standard hand position for racking a semi-auto slide; the Welrod uses a rotary bolt at the back of the pistol. So there's that.
The gun was NOT malfunctioning.
With subsonic ammo, and a big can like he was using, it may not cycle the slide.
Also, there is a device that you can use that prevents the slide from cycling, which makes the shot even more quiet.
Watch the video, he instantly racks the slide, every shot. He was operating that weapon, not clearing a jam.
but how many guns have a slide lock
i know you can fabricate one but what was the likelihood of that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQPsf_wDbmU
Speed, I don’t think it was a slide lock, but it’s a possibility.
I think it was just subsonic ammo, and with that big can, the gun would not cycle. And he practiced enough to know that.
It’s one of those “just competent enough” deals that makes laymen think he’s a pro, and pros think he’s a wannabe.
"the technology has a '90 percent error rate"
this must be about the same ai thats going to replace us right
actually what if the 90 percent error rate is by design so that that can profit more than they would be able to relative to people making those decisions by hiding behind the fact that it was an ai program that did it
"in the Red Bull wouldn’t be a strong 2nd place in this year’s championship"
pick literally anyone and youd be right nearly every time
also is the radical black because squid ink is black
The sad reality is they don't care. They'll replace you with an AI with a 90% error rate. They'll send the job to incompetent people overseas because they don't care if your customer service experience is awful if it saves them ten cents
i know youre right
it sucks
those people are vindictive and evil
Premeditated, for sure, could be anything from an angry relative of a customer to something more ah collusive.
Given how cost always go up with healthcare profits and the trend doesn't seem to be leading to healthy people I could see any number of motives.
Far more likely that it is a pissed off shareholder than a patient, Americans haven't taken on business since the Battle of Matewan. That or some Epstein type shit.
I think patient over shareholder, someone's life/family could've been ruined and they snapped. Clearly the guy had some sort of training though, so I'm with the other type shit being a decent possibility too
'Americans haven't taken on business since the Battle of Matewan.'
God damn it, you're right.
My first thought was Epstein info release is likely imminent. Anyone seen Billy-Boy or Crooked Hillary out and about recently?
Guy makes 10mil a year and he was staying at the midtown Hilton?
Investor conference.
Well the shareholders were picking up the tab.
Next guy should stay at Aman.
That place is cheaper than I expected, the 3.7ksqft 3 bedroom suite on the 19th floor is only 1800/night on a random Friday in February
Well let’s back the truck up and go spend a week there!
(Also seems “cheap” to me)
February is the nadir of off-season, but that still seems cheap. Can't afford not to book it!
That, or begging one's pardon, the RH guesthouse. Just run up the tab
https://rhguesthouse.com/rooftop
As long as the shareholders are paying!
When I was on my weeklong “vacation” in Naples, FL about 10 years ago (detailed elsewhere in this thread), the client volunteered to pick up our expenses, thinking this was some magnanimous gesture to the deal team (obviously we would’ve expensed this internally otherwise).
We were staying at the Ritz. They had a modest selection of cigars in the bar area, including a partial box of Opus X Perfexcion No. 2s, my favorite Opus X size. My boss asked me what they cost in Atlanta - $18 apiece at the time. At the Ritz, they were $88 apiece.
One night after dinner (during which the four members of the deal team ordered so much food the restaurant staff had to set up an “overflow” table for additional appetizers), he told the bartender: “We’ll all start with doubles of whatever your most expensive Macallan scotch is, and we’ll take all of those Opus whatever cigars.”
What I want to know is why were they having the investor conference in NYC? Place has become a complete shithole.
Because that’s where the investors are?
I doubt that. All of the 'rich' people fled NYC years ago when they started having special taxes levied against them.
The business still happens there, and they all still have places there even if their residence is outside of NYC
Umm…
Where is the highest density of American institutional investors’ headquarters or significant offices? Within walking distance of the crime scene.
For any (potential) investors who decided to fly into NYC for the event, there are numerous (endless, really) opportunities to piggyback meetings with other people in the city, unparalleled dining choices, Christmas shopping (wives often attend this sort of thing if traveling in - free trip), etc.
That’s why the conference was held there.
All the rich may have fled, but it is the wealthy who drove them out.
That NYC Hilton is basically designed to hold big events like this, and the money is already there.
CEO's that don't go hold investor days/conferences in NYC do not get the same valuations/respect as those who do.
So Berkshire Hathaway should stop meeting in Omaha?
Warren holds his annual meeting in Omaha, as is his preference (and part of his personal image cultivation).
He is in the position to do that, but most companies are not.
There are murderers there!
With the way NYC cracked down on Airbnbs in town, hotel prices have been crazy--I would *not* be surprised to learn that a room there is 4 figures.
I think a substantial portion of the hotel rooms have been appropriated as housing for "undocumented migrants."
For how much longer, we’ll see!
The mid-town Hilton is like $600 a night when I am in NYC for a conference. Used to be half that.
I was once bizarrely upgraded to a suite at the Palace on a work trip to NYC in ~2018. It had to have been 2,500 sq feet and featured spectacular views.
The only mega suite I have stayed in was a Sheraton in India in Gujarat. It was enormous and not expensive. For background, Gujarat India is dry (no alcohol) and the majority of locals are vegetarians, so their KFC branches do not sell chicken. I don’t recommend travel to India ever, for any reason, yet I end up there about once a year.
"I don’t recommend travel to India ever, for any reason"
ive never heard of anyone recommend going there who isnt indian and even some of my indian pals have warned me not to go
surely it cant be that bad
Oh yes, it is.
I like the people I work with there. We are exporting, not outsourcing, so a good situation.
India is very much a sensory extreme situation. Everything is loud. Tons of people everywhere all the time. Riding in any vehicle is risking death. The food is activity trying to kill you. It is a very uncomfortable place for a westerner.
okay then yeah id hate being there then
call me soft but i dont want to tolerate that kind of environment for any real length of time
Seinfeld warned us (S9E8 1997-11-20):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sUMtHcUMWo
(Peugeot in the establishing shot)
Not to mention that the English they speak is like a foreign language to a Western English speaker!
you have no idea.
been there once. there was a TSA style checkpoint at the hotel entrance, after the shuttle car got past the retracting bollards and guards.
the road traffic was unbelievable and basically indescribable.
driving in India is kinda fun. Would be a great school for those "safety conscious" snitches on our roads
...and don't call me Shirley
I am so very sorry that you have to go through this.
YOU are closer to deserving $10 M/year than the healthcare guy!
Are all the hotels in India owned by American immigrants?
Unlikely. However, the American hotels in India are great. There are none (or very limited) at moderate price. You have a couple Hiltons, Conrad’s, JW M, and then Hyatt, Sheraton and up. They are fortresses/palaces, as there were terrorism issues in the past. And, most critically, the high end hotels are safe to eat at.
It was a joke about hotel ownership in the US.
Same here except in Dallas. Presidential suite which they apparently upgraded to the 100th person checking in when not in use. Probably about the same size. No real view, though.
It was a little awkward as I was traveling with a client who was checking in right behind me. Fortunately I had known him from the Beatrice days mentioned elsewhere. I offered it to him but he good naturedly declined. Did business with him for another decade.
I recall once flying back from a conference (Delta flight NYC to ATL).
My boss (IB MD) had been upgraded to first class. One of our clients (regional bank CEO) boarded and headed for coach; boss leapt up to give that guy his seat, naturally.
Then that client sold itself without our help a year later!
"No honor among thieves."
(Or maybe "a personal favor on an airplane does not override fiduciary duty")
IB advisory is a knife fight, typically.
That bank hired Stephens to sell itself, likely because Warren took the CEO to play golf in Augusta more than once.
https://www.ft.com/content/ec972106-e168-42ee-9805-b9854bb65b82
Warren is now set to be the Ambassador the Court of St. James’s!
Did they properly address you as Mr. Tillman?
Mr. Sherman, good to see you again
There's a few outstanding problems just before we check you in
Let's see here, you left a "tribute" pic of JD Vance
And the message with the desk say here it's next to soiled pants
And oh, just a reminder 'bout our policy
Don't leave off making fun of poors who are shopping at DG
Okay, did you and your guests have a pleasant stay
Just imaginary friends who were too dumb to keep away
And oh, will you need a driver for your GT3?
'Cause the carbon buckets weren't meant to fit anyone who's just five three
https://carbonfibergear.com/blogs/carbonfiber/carbon-fiber-childrens-car-seat-prototype-by-rory-craig
seat in question
I think something stinks in Denmark and there was a reason he was not staying where the conference occurred.
At the police press conference they said they shooter was laying in wait at the conference hotel and shot him as he approached the hotel, so he likely was staying someplace else.
'Was this the first in a tidal wave of violent action taken to hold executives directly accountable for the behaviors that enrich, elevate, and separate them? '
Archer/Krieger meme goes here.
Terms of Enrampagement 2: Electric *REDACTED*
0. I honestly don't care that they were using AI to deny claims. My wife has worked for insurance and doctors offices for over a decade, and honestly much of what goes on from both sides is employees wanting too much money for jobs that can either be automated or eliminated all together. Done right, much of what goes on at both doctors offices and at the insurance companies is purely wasteful, and could potentially save customers money. It's the same reason McD's is using kiosks. Its somehow different because it's insurance instead? I'm not buying it.
Caveat: United Healthcare is a for profit insurance company. Many insurance companies are not for profit or limited, like where my wife worked. There is no guarantee that any money saved by automation would get passed to the customer at a for profit insurance company. Also keep in mind that auto insurance claims are also becoming increasingly automated( possibly even using AI).
1. I also could care less about these people's pay. Different topic, but we have a judge in Delaware deciding on what compensation should Elon Musk make, even thought the board has on multiple occasions what that compensation should be.
2. I think there is a fair argument that no medical insurance company should be for profit. I think that is a conversation that SHOULD have been had before the government forced everyone to have insurance. No one asked this question either when states started forcing everyone to have auto insurance as well. Law of unintended consequences.
Not-for profit does not mean significant profit. Our health systems are non-profit (excluding Tenet) and most of which want to increase profit and margin. Mayo Clinic is that same designation, yet they bring in about $16Billion in revenue. Kaiser does 10x more revenue than Nvdia. Healthcare is broken, but not because of any one thing.
Also, I think that H-1B visas for nonprofits are exempt from the annual cap.
Non-profit health systems are worse, actually. WVU Medicine, for instance, is a “non-profit,” which mostly just allows them to exploit the DOJ’s policy of declining antitrust suits against nonprofits. They still make plenty, and get to have a monopoly too.
But "health systems" are very different than insurance. Everything about a not for profit insurance company is different than a not for profit hospital or health system.
Most not for profit hospitals in my area are partially state funded and are guided by the state as well, which means they can just be terrible when it comes to getting services, especially elective services.
True, but Will specifically mentioned health systems.
I have heard stories about WVU Medicine that are shocking. They are very, very aggressive in nasty ways. Every state has multiple systems just like them too. Sutter in CA is one of the more well known egregious actors. They got caught destroying evidence in a whistleblower suit related to Medicare Advantage fraud just a couple years ago.
I work pretty much exclusively in the healthcare policy space when I’m not doing fundraising/campaign consulting. WVU Medicine is cutthroat and calculated to an immense degree. They even started an insurance company, I assume to test the limits of Stark Law or something.
Revenue isn't profit though. I'm confused by your statement.
My local state run non-profit hospital doubled its revenue over the last 3 years. But they've expanded services and purchased 3 other regional hospitals in that same course.
Will also say that insurance company profit margins are capped.
This only applies to the fully-insured portion of their business, which is a small portion of overall revenue. There is a reason insurers all bought PBM’s, Optum is the largest employer of physicians, etc.
One of the unintended consequences of the ACA is massive diversification of revenue streams by the BUCAH insurance companies over the last 15 years to sources that don’t count under the MLR calculation that is the cap I assume you’re referencing. You should see the massively outsized margin contribution Optum Rx makes to United Health Group’s overall income.
Solid points. There’s a longer discussion plus some of the work I did in trying to create a price war in the pharmacy space. Non profit systems, if they can get together, could break pbms
The work that Civica has done is a good example of what you’re talking about in the pharmacy space.
I wish more of the smaller regional systems would really step up to work together to directly contract with employers. This would be a huge win for everyone who creates or receives value, but it’s a slog nowadays to get this contracting in place one by one.
They’re sort of doing that, but doesn’t go far enough.
It’s honestly funny watching the complaints about the ACA from the exact same people who were defending the Aca. It’s been shit for more than ten years. Oh well.
Ya, it was never about controlling cost, more about coverage. It has succeeded on that front at the expense of even faster cost growth.
There are so many wonky elements of the ACA that never make it into the public discourse. Some are unintended consequences like I described above and some are things that have actually led to some improvements (like surgical bundles becoming more common and some of the learnings from the pioneer ACO programs).
Yes!
I had this same discussion with a friend. His excuse was that our state didn't buy into the additional medicaid/medicare that some states did. Even if the state did actually do those things, that wouldn't have any effect on our insurance rates and medical costs.
Just to crack the books....
United Health only made 6 percent net profit in 2023 even though their revenue was up 15 percent.
What does that mean? Premiums went up and so did their medical payments.
The not for profit health insurance company my wife worked for had a 3.5 percent net profit, which went back to their reserves because they are short millions in reserves ( which started in 2012 ).
In trying not to give away too much of who I am, I have worked for a non-profit health system(s) and the attempt to create more margin and more profit for health systems remains quite strong. There are ways to do this and most are striving for greater margin because margin sits at 1% - 3% if they're a good system rural systems tend to be in trouble, hence the consolidation. I don't know Mayo's net profit related to their revenue, but can tell you that for how many locations they have vs revenue, it's large and probably shouldn't have that status considering all the ways they do make money.
My point is more that non-profit, just doesn't mean they aren't trying to make as much profit as possible, but can be more flexible in service lines. There's a lot of money being spent in healthcare, just not a lot of money being made and many hide behind the non-profit status and fall well short of their charitable requirement.
insurance company profit margins are capped
like this ceo
I think that’s easy to say until you re at the butt end of the health care and running out of options. I can guarantee that your doctor will care more about you getting what you need than your insurance company even if you’ve been paying them for 50 years. The reason why venture capital is so successful in buying out the healthcare system is that being a private practice physician is financially challenging for most meanwhile insurance companies don’t seem to be having any trouble with their margins. I’ll get off my soapbox now
Here and there in the historical record one finds tales of payment in the form of live chicken, prior to the creation of Blue Cross. I can't blame the physicians.
Rewind 50-60 years ago. How would someone afford it then?
I would agree that basic and even possibly advanced medical care pre-medical insurance was probably on the whole cheaper. I have to imagine though that there were treatments or therapeutics that were simply unaffordable to the average person.
Of course health care was cheaper, there were plenty of treatments that didn't exist. Paying for a nurse to stare at 5 heart attack patients for a few days in the ICU and give them aspirin was much cheaper than a single cardiac cath. ;)
Especially back then, when a tiny portion of RNs would have had a BSN and they were paid pretty poorly, so the main reason to go into nursing was to have a better chance of marrying a doctor. Now RNs get paid well enough that even men will go to nursing school.
One of my multitudinous brother-in-laws is a nurse working towards RN.
It's the job he's stuck with the longest outside of being an MP in the Army.
STAY ON THE SOAPBOX
Seriously
As a general proposition, non-profit insurance companies and health systems are tax evasion scams. I run a company in the employer health plan space that happens to be at the center of a bunch of transformation going on, so get to see a bunch of behind- the-scenes stuff. Their behavior is certainly no better than the for profit companies and is often worse.
My favorite people to talk to are slightly intoxicated former executives of major healthcare orgs. We’ve found out some crazy things. For example, some non-profit health systems are the largest land owners in the counties in their service areas because they have to hide the money somewhere. Their financials aren’t subject to GAAP or other oversight (e.g., shareholders). This lets them move money around between their entities in ways that would make the Enron guys blush.
I’m no fan of the for profit companies either, but they’re all the same.
They get audited over a certain size. We do them occasionally. The books are usually crap and we are not for profitable when we do them
That’s what I’ve heard from friends that do audits. Lots of shady practices that would never fly with a publicly traded company in any other industry. My understanding is even if they’re audited, they’re not required to follow GAAP, so lots of weird stuff sneaks in.
All the financial level shenanigans is in addition to the insane operational inefficiencies that exist on the ground. The fact that a lot of hospitals have more admin/support folks than clinicians is still insane to me after years in the space.
It’s a different framework. Im more on the tax side than the audit side but the stuff that public companies get away with can also be egregious. I worked for one of them. We do small size nfp so they’re typically underfunded and short on talent and employees. The ones we do arent corrupt. At least not obviously so.
Ya, the small NFP provider orgs tend to be the “good guys” because they could have sold out years ago, but have generally tried to stay independent so they can provide the best care at reasonable prices.
My comments aren’t meant to let the large publicly traded folks off the hook. They’re awful as well. I know of scenarios where large carriers make more on a claim than the care provider because of spread pricing between what they pay the provider and what the employer pays. It’s nasty stuff.
Overall there are lots of good people in all sorts of orgs, but are stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.
So should insurance companies be traded or not?
Lots of folks across the interwebs blame CEO pay on shareholders demand for stock performance. But public companies have different standards to operate under.
That’s a hard question to answer. I don’t think it’s a binary thing. The profit motive is a big issue, but that exists regardless of whether the entities are non-profit or not, publicly traded or not. These are complex, systemic problems.
The big thing lacking that my company focuses on and where I have the most knowledge is the general lack of backbone and sophistication on the part of employers and unions when purchasing healthcare and building their health plans. If they were better at that as a whole, there would be a lot more push back on bad behavior across hospitals, insurers, PBM’s, etc.
There is a lot of focus right now on fiduciary duties that employers have related to how they spend money for health benefits and this seems to be waking them up to be better stewards of the money. I’m cautiously optimistic about this. J&J, Wells Fargo, and others have had breach of fiduciary duty related lawsuits brought against them in the last year. I know of around 20 other similar lawsuits in the works too.
My favorite is when an ins co owns a pharma co and will not cover competing products.
Why are there so many ways to make money that are intrinsically evil?
Nonprofits are also exempted from the H-1B visa annual cap.
Of course! 🙄
This, anecdotally, wasn't the case where my wife worked. I don't know about all states . Could the company launder money through paying high money to execs? Sure. The state required that excesses had to get put into reserves. How often did the state audit them? I don't know. What I can say is their claims and processing is so antiquated that there is huge waste in employees doing the jobs that can easily be automated.
"Siri, bring up a graph of Cigna's stock price over all time; please mark where Obamacare was implemented."
interesting how it never went down ever after that
And Cigna is the worst performing of the big insurers.
Did Obamacare prop up the insurance companies long term? Absolutely. We all knew it would.
Short term though many insurance companies were losing money though.
Everyone wants to blame insurance companies and in some cases they rightfully should.
But WE, the consumers, forced the medical fields hand ~40 years go. Insurance wasn't really a thing until employees and unions started demanding insurance as a benefit for working for an employer. Hospitals and Doctors were forced to start taking it.
A number of Hospitals in the 80's started closing because they were too small and didn't want to deal with insurance ( this happened in several large cities in Florida). Bigger hospitals were accepting it and dealing with it, then they got bigger even creating more of a local monopoly on healthcare.
Fast forward and we vote for President who just hands the keys over to insurance companies.
The ACA didn't do what it said on the tin and distorted the market such that insurance and healthcare cartels are booming and the middle class is getting crushed.
I believe we live in a corrupt country - we're just materially well off enough not to notice most of the time. ACA and its fallout is one of the prime examples in my mind.
I've always believed corruption exists, but the American spirit of publishing everything and squealing for 15 minutes of fame reduces the length of that corruption and thus can be remedied. Term limits for all.
Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker
Lobbyists
Regulatory capture (see above)
VP of the US using his son as a go-between to broker deals
It's definitely there, just not as obvious or in your face as directly greasing someone's palm.
"Not for Profit" just means the excess cash gets thrown into bloated exec headcount and comp, frivolous capex (looking at you Cleveland Clinic), and misguided acquisitions.
I don't know about every insurance company, but in the state that I live and the insurance company my wife worked for, it didn't work that way. Did the CEO make good money? Sure.
The insurance company she worked for, very large within the state, lost money for several straight years due to Obamacare. They are/were required to keep reserves, and they were almost depleted. When they had excesses in 2016, they had to put the extra money into the reserves.
Two kids lost their Dad. Yeah, there are probably scores of kids who lost their parent due to United Healthcare. But my heart still goes out to those kids.
Agreed, that's never a good thing.
Hey, I coulda been that guy if I'd made the same career choices he did. But you don't get to the top under your own power with clean hands.
And I hate having messy hands.
They will only have his ill-gotten millions from the deaths of thousands of other mothers, fathers, and children to comfort them.
Thanks for background on the squid, Jack. Not that you asked, but I think the current iteration is lacking character and would benefit from at least a bit of the original Squidco hand drawn look to it.
I should find a real artist to do something with personality, for sure.
Make the tentacles into a flame job.
It looks a bit personal defense-ish to me, somehow, which isn't bad.
But- Eyebrows and tentacles balled into fists perhaps?
Boy, don’t ya just hate it when bad stuff happens to good people?
Anyway, next season I’m hoping to see Franco at CashApp Visa Raging Bull or whatever it’s called along side Lawson and Yuki elevated to the big team.
Yuki definitely deserves it (or a shot to replace one of the other moving drivers), but we'll see what happens. I'm also interested to see how Sainz gets on at Williams
They shouldn't even let Checo drive a golf cart IMO. Sending him to VCARB just throws away a slot that could go to someone with actual promise. I had the same issue sending Ricky there.
That’s why I would love to see Franco there
I like the squid.
Doing logos is hard. I tried for ages to come up with one, then one of my fans handed me this one (which I've since trademarked) for free! All he wanted was for me to name a ship in one of the series after his mom. (I also gave him a bunch of paperbacks).
I see way too many people who think that their FACE is a perfectly good logo (or album cover! UGH!! - Phil Collins gets a pass cause at least he was doing it ironically). It's surprising how quickly people will connect it to you. I also like the way it came about for you, it's a good story. Kids can be cruel, turning their cruelty back on them always burns them.
As an aside: What's a good brand of leisure shirts these days? When I left the tech/contract world I dumped all of my dress button up shirts. I've been wearing t-shirts (nice ones, but still t-shirts) ever since and I'm starting to miss wearing something nicer. So what brands would you recommend? (and no polo-shirts please, though Rugby shirts are fine).
Logos and branding are brutal. I've been in too many meetings going in circles until someone just says make a word mark and be done (although that just starts it all over again..)
What's a leisure shirt to you? Untucked button down with short sleeves?
Short or long, depending on the season.
Also, ones that more easily hide a belt holster is always a plus - though most of those don't always look so great.
The best logos are those that're recognizable a mile away. The USAF logo, the Confederate battle flag, the McDonald's golden arches.
One's face isn't in the same ZIP code.
The FedEx logo by Linden Leader When the CEO told him to make the arrow a different color, Leader convinced him that it worked best subliminally.
Did you know that Raymond Loewy did the graphic design for Air Force One?
I didn't, but something about it DOES say "Raymond Loewy."
During my entrepreneurship days, when I had 20/15 vision, I taped the Motorola batwing, the bitten Apple, and my candidate logo(s) to the side of the group mailbox at the condominium and viewed them from a distance.
https://turnbullandasser.com/collections/summer-shirts
I’ll say it if no one else will: I think T&A shirts are fairly ugly!
That is despite the fact that Chris Harris’s far more interesting friend Neil Clifford (Kurt Geiger CEO, former owner of the destroyed Bristol Fighter) is a director of the company.
My super clotheshorse friends who have been everywhere and tried it all now favor Luca Avitabile bespoke, even over Charvet.
I am tempted to try 100 Hands, even though they are from *shudders* India.
100 hands is a pretty big horse
14 Hands is a pretty shitty wine.
Of course.
Also, shout out to Mr. Hands, who would have liked a big horse.
(Don't Google that if you are easily disgusted or offended.)
i have been on the internet long enough to know about that
it is unpleasant
He died doing what he loved.
"My super clotheshorse friends who have been everywhere and tried it all now favor Luca Avitabile bespoke, even over Charvet."
I guess if you've never heard of or worn Marol then yeah! Happily I have more than twenty original Borellis in the box, as well.
I prefer the “Italian” shirt aesthetic over the “English” version.
I could live happily with nothing but light blue shirts.
That is like preferring being a pimp to being a fighter pilot.
I hasten to specify NORTHERN Italian shirting aesthetic.
You can keep those Austin Powers striped shirts.
well... hmm.
That's quite the dilemma unless we're talking the Rickenbacker or WWII era, in which case i will re-fold the switchblade and don the leather helmet and goggles.
Christ! Buy three shirts or buy another Roadmaster.
Fruit of the Loom it is!
Most of three hundred bucks for a shirt?!
Yeah, the casual stuff is much cheaper than the custom dress shirts.
I spent $200 at all American clothing for pants, three different shirts and a sweater.
As the not haute couture man I assume I shall stand out and be decided as "that homeless looking guy" should I ever attend a First Principles meeting
I’m the one in the black Nike hoodie and jean shorts—you’d be fine!
$260 for a t shirt!
Sorry, they look like they are cut using a dress pattern.
The Zappa family trademarked Frank's mustache, and soul patch.
https://seeklogo.com/vector-logo/427993/frank-zappa
It's not visible at a mile, but instantly recognizable nonetheless.
For casual (truly casual, & cheap) Jcrew makes an acceptable shirt, and Gustin makes a good shirt if your body is proportioned for their fit.
If you need to conceal, something made to be left untucked (I wouldn't recommend Untuckit, but many shirt makers now offer a shirt cut to be worn un-tucked and this would lower likelihood of printing.
But for anything even vaguely serious with buttons, the correct answer is just have some shirts made to order. Wherever you can get a local tailor to measure you and work with you to get you the fit you want, over time. The first shirts should be imperfect. It should take a few fittings and sewn shirts to get it perfect. A shirt should tolerate your wristwatch (or penchant to roll sleeves) (or large forearms from weightlifting). Subsequently, if you fall head-over-heels down the Alice Wonderland rabbithole, you can take those measurements or even shirts to someone like Turnbull or really any number of fine custom clothiers and ask them to replicate in their fabric with their craftsmen and their take on your goals.
There is no one answer here. If you need to sweat in the shirt, the LuLulemon Commission longsleeve makes sense but is almost like a button-down version of a polo shirt, if that makes sense.
All this sounds like an awesome rabbit hole, I just do not have the bandwidth to clothesmaxx
Allow me to suggest blakemill.co.uk. They will ship to the US as I sent one to my nephew in California. I favour the plain white shirts with a bit of colour inside the collar for semi-formal use - it obviates the need for a tie (and who does that these days) but also avoids the dressed like a crow effect. And if you want to go loud, they have that well covered. You’re reasonably unlikely to meet anyone else in one at your local bbq…
Not casting aspersions, but be careful with the sizing - US “L” can translate to XL in the UK.
I’ve been 28, underemployed and working with those types - to include some from UnitedMedical, during my LTC medical field days. I met some people who I’d gladly uh ‘crowdfund against’. Can you really prosecute thousands of people if the money happened to be spent ambiguously and towards a dastardly and unforseen ending? I just figured they’d toilet paper his house or create some type of professional inconvenience…right. Right?
But I’ve names. Lots of spite too for being completely shit on for being poor and living in my equally crappy flyover Ohio town. I’ll kick extra to promise some third party immolation.
Crowdfunding a bit of... Action Directe!, as the French would say. It *should* be legal!
Hopefully, this guy's hit dredges up all the cancer patients slid into pine boxes in order to up the company's stock price by ten cents.
In a way, he'd be a retroactive hero for that!
This is to the best of my knowledge, and I do not think confidential in any way. I am fascinated by how AI can be of legitimate assistance with accurate billing and payments in healthcare.
My wife started with that CEO's company 7 months ago, and I am worried that she will either be replaced with AI, or her job will become supervising and defending AI decisions, although in the second case I could see how that would work and eliminate 75%, mostly nurses, who work in her department.
The best I can tell her department is not by design an evil one. There are standards of care the determine what can be charged for a service, specifically in her department if a hospital stay can be billed as an observation or something more. These standards are the same ones medicare/medicaid use. For either case various things need to be documented and submitted to insurance. The cases where the documentation is insufficient or does not match the charges are flagged, which doesn't require anything as complex as to be called "AI", the records are pulled and summarized by nurses, and then passed up to a physician who has many years of experience and possess various credentials for standards of care in hospital medicine. My apologies to any medical professionals who can state that more accurately.
The case is either approved for payment, or sent back with a request for more documentation, and finally a review with a physician at the facility that submits the claim who can make the case for a higher billing code. All of this seems like an eminently fair way of preventing billing fraud from the hospitals, and since it is an institution, there are no laypeople who can be duped.
I have to imagine that 90% of what I just described can be done with AI, reviewed by a human, who while not medically legally responsible is the authority on the matter, and re-submitted with an option of appealing. If it can't be, then LLM really is useless.
With any luck my wife will survive the inevitable culling and emerge a co-worker with our AI overlords. She certainly doesn't want to go back to clinical medicine.
"The cases where the documentation is insufficient or does not match the charges are flagged, which doesn't require anything as complex as to be called "AI", the records are pulled and summarized by nurses, and then passed up to a physician who has many years of experience and possess various credentials for standards of care in hospital medicine. My apologies to any medical professionals who can state that more accurately."
I think Propublica stated it "more accurately," which is to say denying claims based on an average of 1.2 seconds of review...which is 100% believable to literally anyone who has worked in health care and isn't completely oblivious. Yeah, AI could totally do that.
https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims
Talk to any physician who deals with rejected claims (I manage to avoid most of that in the ED, thankfully) and you'll find that every last one has a story about an appeal turned down by someone in a totally unrelated specialty.
In this case it involves at least two humans on the insurance end, and after the review significant amounts of documentation to support the conclusion, followed by, if appealed, a peer to peer conversation between two physicians. All of which is insanely expensive way of determining if something is documented to meet specific criteria set by a government organization.
This BS drives me particularly crazy - a perfect example of just pushing costs elsewhere. United might save "x" by using AI, but the total system costs might not shrink if a medical practice has to spend more money to deal with the mistakes. I've seen demos of software being peddled to doctors that basically promise to use AI to deal with insurance AI. SMFH.
"or her job will become supervising and defending AI decisions"
^ many of our jobs will become this. As the saying goes, "AI isn't coming for your job, but the person who can 'use' it better is."
AI is just the latest version of deploying a very promising tech in the laziest, most-shareholder-oriented way possible.
I am not saying there isn't a ton of BS in insurance, but what I am seeing and hearing since my wife works from home is more analogous to this.
Your under warranty car breaks down and gets towed to the nearest dealer.
The dealer submits a claim for a new engine and the labor on replacement, there are criteria for doing so.
Claim gets rejected because there is no documentation about why there needs to be a new engine and labor for replacement.
There is a phone call, the mechanic describes a how there is a big hole in the engine block from a broken rod.
Claims processor says "Great, take a picture of it, and the casting number like you are supposed to and re-submit"
So, for a human body. "Of course this is more than an observation, the patient was diabetic, in sepsis, and we had to amputate their foot"
"Great, put the documentation of that in the record and resubmit."
Medical care is a scarce good, and other than situations where an individual is paying 100% out of pocket those expenses are born by a larger group, either taxpayers or insurance premium payers. There has to be some accountability of how and why those resources are used. Billing fraud is rampant and it costs all of us money. These is an expectation that care is given on the basis of best practices and that those things are a matter of record.
There is ample evidence that documentation and records keeping are a major factor in physician burnout. Far more time is spent on that than what one would think of as actual patient care. But if it isn't done, no one gets paid and there aren't hospitals and doctors offices.
Yeah, I understand that and agree philosophically.
I guess my experience - using this analogy - is often more like an OEM that only reimburses for 1hr of warranty labor for "x," when the work clearly needs 1.5. And so the dealer does the 1hr and hopes the CEL doesn't return as you drive home. FCA loved doing this (ask me how I know).
United is my current insurer (but we're moving back to BCBS in Jan), and they've basically operated the same way for both my ENT and orthopedics work over the past 2 years.
A note from another perspective:
In my one and only meeting with the CEO of a major insurance company, he made it very clear that he was offended by the entire concept of paying claims. He thought the only job of an insurance company was to accept premiums. (I've mentioned this here before.)
Hey, I used to work for a CEO of an insurance company who thought the only job of an insurance company was to pretend to be a lifestyle brand!
“I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”
--Clarence Darrow (often misattributed to Mark Twain)
Darrow, one of those truly despicable villains that pre-collegiate schooling never dared dwell upon.
Teaching what the man's life really was and what the concrete effects of his actions ended up being really might chasten this country in a positive way.
Oh come on, next thing you'll be telling me that Rosa Parks was a committed agitator and not just a random maid on a bus.
Hey there. Next you'll be telling me King didn't write his own speeches or pick up his own prostitutes.
imagine if she didnt even need to be there becuase her husband owned a car or something
wild