The CEO of UnitedHealth’s insurance division was gunned down Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown in what police called a “brazen, targeted” attack.
Brian Thompson, 50, was repeatedly shot by a masked gunman about 6:46 a.m. who had been lying in wait outside the Sixth Avenue hotel, said NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
Thanks to your generosity, we were able to upgrade our service plan. Hopefully this will help us address some of our performance issues.
on Meta Ends Fact-checking ProgramThey? on Meta Ends Fact-checking ProgramTo be fair, he is touting Anschluss lately.
on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025This is not a good issue for the CPC and making Canadian politics about it is the biggest risk Poili…
on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025Oooh, there may be a wrinkle. Pierre Poilievre has tweeted "Canada will never be the 51st state. Per… on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025Tariffs in theory could utterly tank the Canadian economy fast, because North America is so networke… on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025Threats of chili powder, cayenne pepper.
on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025What economic forces will Trump use to get Canada to bend the knee?
on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025If Trump's going to go with "Gulf of America" he probably doesn't mind dropping Mexico from its hist… on Justin Trudeau Resigns As Liberal Leader and Prime Minster of CanadaLegalized pot and pulling a lot of families above the poverty line with the child tax benefit and th…
on Don’t Bother UsThank goodness we won't have to build a wall to Greenland now!
Moving Picture Showing How Two Men Get Acquainted
January 7, 2025
January 6, 2025
January 4, 2025
A Suburban New Year’s Tragedy, or What’s the Use?
January 2, 2025
on Don’t Bother Us on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025 on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025
on Re-Open the Asylums: A New Take
on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025
on Meta Ends Fact-checking Program
on Re-Open the Asylums: A New Take on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025 on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025 on Meta Ends Fact-checking Program
on The Piketon Massacre Tragedy, Continued
on Open Mic for the week of 1/6/2025 on Meta Ends Fact-checking Program on Meta Ends Fact-checking Program on Re-Open the Asylums: A New Take
The guy was shot at 6:45. There was an investor meeting at 8:00.
The shooter used a silencer.
The shooting took place in a gun-free zone.
The shooter escaped on an e-bike and the cops believe he went into Central Park.
The shooter was immediately mugged after entering Central Park.Report
Anyway. This was a professional hit (or as professional as you’re going to see where it doesn’t look like a heart attack or a drunk driving death) and the idle question I have is whether it came from a disgruntled customer or disgruntled loved one of a customer *OR* whether it was related to CEO stuff.Report
United Healthcare screws a lot of people.Report
What’s the current rate for a professional hitman? I assume it’s pretty high, especially given the post-Covid inflation. So maybe more likely he was getting ready to come clean about all their shady practices and endanger the bajillions of dollars they make, and someone decided 125K to silence him would provide a good ROI.
Disclaimer: This is me just joking around, I have no specific knowledge of any actual shady business practices.Report
“What’s the current rate for a professional hitman?”
I don’t want to google that.
The guy used an e-bike which requires an app, right?
I suppose we’re going to find out if the guy used a burner and a gift card or used his own credit card on his own iphone to rent it.
If it’s the latter, I will embarrassedly retract my assessment that it was a professional hit. It was merely a determined individual who has fired a gun before.Report
An online autist has been scraping citibike data for some data visualization and he’s pretty sure he has the info for the assassin’s bike.
In the replies, a handful of people are arguing that the bike doesn’t appear to be a citibike (wrong frame, they argue) while others are telling him to mind his own g-darn business and stop snitching.Report
The cops have confirmed that it is *NOT* a citibike.Report
Curiosity, man. It eats at you.
So I asked ChatGPT despite knowing that it lies all the time.
NOTE: CHATGPT LIES!!! IT LIES ALL THE TIME!!!
I mean, it might as well have added “the assassin’s name was Hunter deButts”.
But there are some numbers for you.Report
Thanks for the prompt service! I will be sure to come to you for all my future potentially self-incriminating queries about illegal activity.Report
When I was getting gas this morning I saw a bunch of guys in unmarked vans with satellite dishes on top. Could’ve sworn I overheard them saying they were headed to Colorado.Report
Next time you see them, you tell them to start bringing hot dishes.Report
Cops now say no ebike.Report
I’m trying to decide which joke would be more inappropriate: the “pre-existing conditions” one, or the “copay” one, or the “out of network” one, or the…Report
This one was my favorite:
Report
That’ll doReport
One of these days it’s going to turn out to be the dark side of Draftkings…Report
I’m reminded of an op-ed I read back in the Occupy Wall Street days. It was written by a rich guy and was basically a plea to other rich folks that if they push things too far and take too much that eventually, as has happened multiple times in history, the rabble will get highly motivated for significant change and heads will figuratively and/or literally roll.
We don’t yet know the motivation of the shooter, but based on most of the reactions I saw online to the CEO’s murder, I wonder how close we are to a time of head rolling.
Maybe it was just that UnitedHealthcare, with their apparently highest rate of claims denials, was just a particularly hated company.Report
The reactions I’ve seen online veer towards “stochastic terrorism”. Not just the “STOP SNITCHING!” attacks on the autist who has been scraping e-bike data but, like, people have been posting the details of the CEOs of other insurance companies.Report
Sometimes I try to be charitable to leftists. It’s not their fault they aren’t very smart; why should I hold it against them? But they just keep reminding me who they are.Report
Since at least 2016, I’ve seen people suggest that we are in America’s Weimar Republic phase, but perhaps people say that because their historical knowledge is limited, and we’re actually in our Russia in the second half of the 19th century phase, and this is the beginning of our age of the Nihilists?Report
I’m a fan of “Reformation II: Electric Boogaloo” but nobody reads Luther anymore.Report
What would we be reforming?Report
The magisterium that thinks that we need an intermediary between us and (asterisk).
Solus Christus and Sola Scriptura.
Only without a Christ and without a scripture.Report
One might suggest that the rise of cryptocurrency and Reddit-based traders is the modern version of this, with no intermediary or interpreter between the naked man and the naked market.Report
We’re Rome, and we’ve always been Rome: A thin veneer of civilization and sophistication covering a deep, deep core of ignorance, fear, and anger. Our roads are pretty great, too. We do have the advantage over Rome in that our art and music are better.Report
We’re way too rich for either to be good parallels.Report
I was thinking more abstractly: an out of touch ruling elite, an increasingly frustrated petite bourgeoisie (instead of the Russian intelligentia, we have the PMC (though also the universities), and an increasingly class conscious working class. We’re definitely too rich for revolution, so we may not even get to 1905, but we’ve already seen a shot at the czar (that just got his ear), and if people are now gonna go after the princes (like the United Health dude), I think it might be an interesting historical analogy.Report
I guess the big dynamic I feel we lack is something comparable to the late 1800s peasantry, and the way the Russian intelligentsia perceived them. IIRC by the 1870s and 1880s the western educated were seeing the peasants as the source of big political and social change, whereas in our society the comparable factions are both way better off but also increasingly alienated from each other by culture and the winners and losers of an information economy. The whole thing was at heart not just about political rights and freedoms but a big modernization project of Europe’s most backwards political entity. By contrast we are pretty modern, and have no obvious civilization to ‘look up to’ because they have it so much better. Even back then 1905 took a shock defeat by the Japanese to get a real mass movement capable of obtaining concessions.
That said, I could see a case for a similar mentality starting to spread, to the extent that mentality is something like ‘the rules only work if everyone cooperates and the risks of being punished for not cooperating are less than they used to be.’ You called Trump the tsar but there’s a component to him and his entire movement that shouts ‘I’m not going to play by the rules and I dare anyone to do something about it.’Report
See? This is why the Reformation is the good analogy! It’s the Catholic Church versus the revolting Protestants! Hell, Elon can be our Henry the VIII! He was given the title “Defender of the Faith” until the whole heir thing kicked in and suddenly we’re doing the Anglican thing! We could rewrite Man for All Seasons right now!Report
That jackass Nick Hanauer, famous for falsifying data in his economically illiterate Ted Talk about economics, and then throwing a fit when they didn’t feature it in their curated collection of talks?Report
I heard something this morning about there being an ongoing fraud investigation in UnitedHealth and I wonder if someone else was afraid this guy was gonna flip to save his own skin, and so, had him silenced.
I mean, my initial thought “it’s someone whose spouse was denied lifesaving care by the insurance agency” but they’d have to know how to hire a hitman, this doesn’t some like some random guy with a grievance doing the shooting.
Anyway, the streets of our cities being filled with DIY judge/jury/executioners is not a great development, because not every shooter will have such surgical precision and even innocent bystanders will die, and I may wind up being a hermit even before the next pandemic hits.Report
Your initial thought was my initial thought. Someone from flyover whose claim was denied (perhaps by AI… UnitedHealth was the “deny using AI” company).
My thought was not that such a guy wouldn’t know how to use a gun but that such a guy wouldn’t know how to tail a CEO.
Gun Twitter was full of gun nuts (said lovingly) who explained the intricacies of having to do a manual slide move on the gun using a suppressor (which the shooter did do) and so a guy who spends every other weekend at the range smoking a stogie and going through a few hundred rounds would know how to squeeze a trigger rather than merely pulling it but if tailing a CEO? How would anybody know when and where a CEO would be walking on the sidewalk?Report
My thought about that is the same as my thought about the Boeing thing. I doubt any of the executives really cares that much about a fraud investigation; it’s not their money that’ll go to pay the fines. Maybe if someone has actual criminal proceedings against him, and even then I’d think that the cost of hiring a professional assassin to work in a major US city probably exceeds the cost of hiring a defense lawyer to go the distance on a white-collar regulatory issue. (Not to mention that if the guy screws up and gets caught, your trial for “violation of SEC Regulation 9408.2(b)(iii)” becomes “trial for first-degree murder“…Report
My theory is that a) hitmen exist, and b) have loved ones, who c) have UHC health insurance.
It sorta becomes obvious after you realize those three things.
This is a John Wick situation, crossed a bit with Nathan Ford from Leverage. UHC killed a family member.Report
Such a senseless crime…I don’t understand why anyone would be upset enough with an insurance company CEO to be moved to commit murder. Sure is a mystery.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/05/nx-s1-5217617/blue-cross-blue-shield-anesthesia-anthemReport
25 or so years ago when USWest was breaking up, the new CEO for the telco side of the split put a team of accountants and lawyers to work trying to find a way to break the promises that had been made about health insurance for retirees. I mentioned at the time that if he was successful, some retiree who lost a spouse to cancer because of the lack of insurance would murder the CEO. I wasn’t really kidding.
I’ll just casually note that this shooting bears at least a passing resemblance to a how-to description given by the assassin in The Eiger Sanction novel.Report
Looks like they’ve reversed this decision.
As someone who remembers Vizcaino v. Microsoft, I tend to think that this is more likely to result in “yeah, that surgery isn’t covered” than “sure, we’ll pay for four hours of ether but not five”.Report
Here’s a typical Reddit comment in answer to this question: Are you surprised at the lack of sympathy and outright glee the UHC CEO has gotten after his murder? Why or why not?
“I’ll speak to it personally. My sister had multiple surgeries to fix a botched gall bladder removal. Spent most of her life in pain and died of a prescription drug overdose a few years back. She worked as a nurse and still declared bankruptcy twice due to medical bills and she had insurance from her employer. She spent many hours of her life either fighting to get approval for a procedure or fighting off bills that were sent to her in error due to double billing. Take my story and several million others like this and you can see why no one has any empathy towards a cruel system like this or those who lead it.”
Another one quoted Clarence Darrow: “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
American is not shedding many tears for this guy, and I’ll be very surprised if he’s the last one to go down like this.Report
There will be 2nd order effects from this.
Some of which will be exceptionally funny.Report
The only ones I’ve seen in my lifetime involve the government intruding just a little bit more into my life. Not amusing at all.Report
Americans have a touching childlike faith in men in white coats with letters after their names. Whatever the Doctor Man says is true. Look at his white coat, the letters after his name, the framed documents on the walls, you think they give those to just anybody? If the Doctor Man says I need five million dollars of medicine drugs that make my hair fall out and I gain forty pounds and have to have both arms cut off, well, I guess I’ll just buy a wig and learn to write checks with my toes, because surely the Doctor Man would never say anything that benefits him unduly at my expense, surely he’s up to date on all the latest medicine drugs and knows this is the best one.
And if the Doctor Man says that I present a risk for complications under anesthesia and he’s forced to bill at triple rate for double the usual time because of it, well, I guess that’s just how it has to be. And if you want to disagree I’ll need to see your white coat and papers from Doctor School, sir. Oh, you haven’t got ’em? Well, I guess I know who I’ll be listening to about this sort of thing.Report
As opposed to what?Report
I’m sorry, did you get the impression I was asking you anything at all?Report
No, I didn’t. I was asking you. You, of course, have the absolute right not to answer and you have exercised that right. Probably a good idea, all things considered.Report
This isn’t actually what it looks like (though the jokes day of were hilarious). To understand what it is, it’s important to remember that pretty much everyone in the healthcare industry is a bad actor (OK, not nurses), not just insurance companies, and what you’re reading is one of the three worst actors — physicians — spin on what one of the other bad actors — insurance companies — did. In reality, what’s happening here is the insurance company is reducing the pay rates for anesthesia to the Medicare rates/rules, which anesthesiologists, who, let’s face it, are some of the worst actors among stiff competition*, didn’t like, because they make an absurd amount of money and this would mean they make a slightly less absurd amount of money. So anesthesiologists (via the American Society of Anesthesiologists) chose, on probably the best possible day for them to do so, because the evils of health insurance companies had been so successfully highlighted, to spin the hell out of the story to make it seem like insurance companies were saying how long you could be under anesthesia, because let’s face it, as evil as that sounds, it wouldn’t be the worst thing insurance companies do, so it’s pretty believable.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the insurance company did what insurance companies are actually supposed to do: used their buying power to reduce costs. Would it hurt patients? Maybe, because more anesthesiologists will leave the network, but that’s as much on the greedy ass anesthesiologists as it is on BCBS.
There’s an easy, and obvious solution to all of this, of course, one that would bring our health care industry into the developed world. I hope that these conversations bring back the big conversation we were having in earnest in 2016 and 2020.
*Have you ever had surgery, or since it’s all dudes here, known someone who had an epidural, during an insurance-covered procedure, only to find out that the anesthesiologist was out of network? having to pay more for out of network is evil, but so is the fact that anesthesiologists have by and large just refused to join networks.Report
To be fair, if any group of doctors would be able to get the Che T-Shirt Crew on their side, it’d be the ones with Special K.Report
To be fair, doctors are a lot like cops, in that it’s not the profession itself that’s the problem, but the system within which it is embedded, which includes the process of entering the profession, and the way the professionals are compensated. Specifically the system that makes doctors extremely well-paid, but that requires them to go through a multi-year education and hazing process, and to go into massive debt for the privilege. That system attracts a certain kind of person, mostly extremely greedy and status-hungry people, with a few people who care so much about helping people that they’re willing to go through all that thrown in.
They may where rainbow flag masks for surgery, but that’s the industry equivalent of an In This House sign.Report
That exact scenario just happened with a colleague. Her son was seen at an in-network hospital ER for a sports injury, only to find out later, when the bills arrived, that the anesthesiologist was out of network (or at some kind of lower tier or something). It resulted in more money out of pocket and the service not counting towards deductible. My colleagues are of course mostly well enough off lawyer types so no tears necessary over this, but it really is ridiculous, particularly for people without a lot of cash and/or credit readily available.Report
It happened to us when our daughter was born in ’19. What’s particularly infuriating is that we knew it could happen, took steps to prevent it, and on the day of the birth (which was scheduled!), the in-network anesthesiologist was out sick, so we got an out-of-network anesthesiologist, and a few extra grand in out-of-pocket costs, for the epidural.Report
Very interesting angle I hadn’t considered. Thank you.Report
Don’t get me wrong, BCBS is still evil, and they weren’t trying to lower costs for the good of their customers, because customers aren’t going to see that reduction in cost: their copays and the amount going to their deductibles will almost certainly look exactly the same. But this is a fight between snakes, and we shouldn’t side with either of them.Report
Can confirm. Was surprised that the pre-approved procedure from in-network doctor to in-network hospital still managed to fling a $1k out-of-network anesthesiologist fee over the wall when all was done. Like we were going to go shopping for options? Or maybe I might have declined being put-under? What are my options here folks?
Unfortunately Health Care Policy discussions are sooo borked for the foreseeable future. The biggest mistake, IMO, is the focus on cost reductions… No one believes it, no one really cares, and, everyone is more risk averse that they will lose what they have now in chasing cost reductions that won’t come.
Honestly, if we want to change Health Care… it has to be a Middle Class benefit that will cost more in the short run — but which we sell as a QOL on the process side, not a reduction in costs.Report
I was debating this exact issue the other day in the comments on Freddie’s blog. It’s hard for me to see a world where there we find system level savings that are realized by individuals, as opposed to the government. However there is an at least plausible world where we close the system level gaps and eliminate the kind of routine ‘WTFs’ and unforeseen (by the patient) financial catastrophes that still happen all the time.Report
Since we agree, you are, of course, correct… do you want me to go over to Freddie’s blog and let everyone know?Report
Nah I made my case. And substack comment sections are a lot less fun than OT. I wouldn’t want to push anyone over there, certainly not this close to Christmas.Report
Heh, Christmas rules in effect.
I don’t play that way until after Gaudete Sunday… but I’m a big pro-Advent guy.Report
I mean it IS St. Nicholas Day!
In my house it’s all I can do to prevent it from becoming Christmas the second the jackolanterns burn out. My firm stand against Thanksgiving erasure has bought me a Christmas season that lasts from Black Friday through Epiphany, which I feel is reasonable, at least until such time as my wife decides otherwise.Report
Definitely a skill-up in the Christmastime battles.Report
The Iron Triangle remains in effect and, for some reason, people insist on “Done Right”.Report
Right… selling cheaper was a reasonable mistake, but it really did uncover the fact that no-one believes the program would be cheaper and it triggered the aversion to loss function.
Politically, I’d go the opposite direction… there are basically 5 insurers — buy them out and make them regional processors as a large 10-yr merger project. People gets paid, we build on existing tech/efficiencies, and we remodel the policies governing the current market so there’s less friction and inefficiency.
But, make no mistake, it will cost $$ and take time. But what doesn’t?Report
What we need is to get the AI up to speed. Imagine how much faster and cheaper AI medical care could be!Report
Eh, I’m working on real AI projects in Pharma right now… there are some really interesting developments with Image analysis for Cancer and Alzheimer’s. Plus, fine tuned models to search various things from Medical Compliance Specialists, to R&D, to Marketing.
It’s definitely legit… I don’t work in the Provider Space, but cross-over image analysis and diagnostic recommendations will happen. Just not direct to consumer — mediated through a Doctor (or similar).Report
States are actually already starting to ban that.Report
Oh, anesthesiologists? You mean the guys that the Biden Administration specifically called out in its example of the medical industry’s unethical billing practices?Report
1. Professional hitmen are not a thing. They are really not a thing. Most of the ones that people hire end up being undercover cops. Just because someone knows how to use a good competently, doesn’t mean that they are a professional killer. The United State has lots of guns and lots of people who are trained in how to use them competently.
2. There are 5 million registered silencers in the United States and the gun industry has been trying to market them as health devices for gun owners because of the reduced silence.
3. United Healthcare apparently denies 32 percent of all claims for coverage. This is twice the national average for all insurers. I had United Healthcare for a time but I have been lucky so far in life and never had an extraordinary health issue so far (knocks wood). The killer apparently had rounds with the word “deny,” “delay,” “defend” written on them.
4. The response from the internet has been brutal. Media and politicians are covering it as a tragedy but the internet seems to be getting a lot of wicked fun out of the CEO’s death.Report
I’ve seen a handful of journalists covering the CEO’s alleged murder with something close to glee. The smarter journalists, however, are screaming “WE DO NOT WANT TO NORMALIZE THE ASSASSINATION OF MEMBERS OF HATED PROFESSIONS!”Report
No, they do. Just not in the way people think they exist.They do not call themselves hitmen or advertise or make themselves accessible to outside people. You cannot _hire_ them to kill people as some sort of one-off thing.It isn’t a _gig_ thing, and it sure as hell isn’t the $10k hit per-hit that people seem to think is ‘realistic’.
But they do exist. They generally call themselves ‘security professionals’ or ‘ ‘security consultants’. They go on the payroll, or maybe get hired to do some work. When someone needs killing, they go out to kill them.
If you want people killed, you are going to be paying six figures, and you’ll be paying it _aboveboard_, with taxes, because you hired them to do some very very expensive ‘security consulting’.
And as a general rule of thumb: If rich people want an illegal thing to exist, it will exist. It will just be priced appropriately, not the very small amount that people seem to think ‘a hit’ should cost.Report
What you’re talking about isn’t a “hitman” as in the popular imagination though. Its the same set up intelligence agencies and organized crime arrives at through convergent evolution. There are internal to the organization “operators” who do all kinds of tasks, and murders are one of the tasks that they’re responsible for. There doesn’t seem to be a subcategory of assassination specialists within that field.Report
Yeah, but there are also ‘operators’ that do all kinds of tasks, or contract out tasks, for rich people while _not_ being part of an organization. They’re generally called ‘fixers’
Rich people know people who can ‘get anything done’ (Or ask their lawyer who to contact), and if they need someone killed, and don’t happen to have anyone who can do that in their employ, the fixer can make it happen. Ad the rich person will play the fixer some rather large fee for something unrelated, and actual murderer will get paid somehow.
There _are_ professional contracted killing in this world.
They just exist in a way that is totally opaque to everyone else.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of low-level criminals who will do anything if you pay them, too…including immediately flip on you if they get caught, or just be FBI agents to start with, that’s pretty popular.
But it does exist. Somewhere between 2%-5% of all _solved_ killings are contract killings, usually for insurance payouts or monetary reasons like inheritance and pre-nups (You will notice these are all rich people things), and that proportion is probably higher for unsolved ones. Mostly because contract killings are automatically at least _slightly_ harder to solve, due to the fact that actual killer has no obvious motive and the person with the motive probably made sure they had an alibi. And if actual professionals are involved, it could be much MUCH harder to solve.
The popular concept of a hitman is bogus, but it isn’t particularly more bogus than the popular concept of ‘cat burglar’ (Ironically because most theft is actually much easier than the competency porn shown in fiction) or ‘car thief’. The actual problem is if you buy into the popular conception of hitmen and try to get one, you will be hiring either a cop or a complete nincompoop.Report
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14164727/united-healthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-assassin-support.html
UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassin is hailed a hero by an army of Americans: Murder triggers outpouring of hate directed at health insurance industry with killer lauded as ‘man of the people’
Perhaps there’s some problems with our healthcare system…..Report
“Perhaps there’s some problems with our healthcare system…”
mmmhm, yes, just like 10/7/2023 suggested there were “some problems” with the “Jewish system”?Report
What?Report
The whole thing reminds me of the bit in “Jurassic Park” where the lawyer gets eaten by a dinosaur, and the whole theater cheered and laughed, and I saw an article in the paper with quotes from actual lawyers saying “…hey, that kinda hurts.”Report
The lawyer didn’t even do anything, IIRC.
They have the same thing happen in Jurassic World to one of the lead’s assistants, who…also hadn’t done anything.Report
My theory is now that this was business-related. Something about the bullets having “deny”, “delay”, and “depose” written on them screams “RED HERRING” instead of “REVENGE”.
What in the heck was he planning on announcing at the shareholders’ meeting?Report
Do you have a basis for this or is it just wild speculation because of sh^t and giggles?Report
A basis?
Well, it has to do with the whole “who is likely to shoot a guy on the sidewalk thing and get away with it?”
A guy overcome with rage is likely to make big mistakes. Sure, maybe he’ll accomplish it anyway, but he’ll get caught in the first 48 hours afterwards.
A professional is capable of being more detached and also knows that the best way to get away is to create a distraction. If it was a pro, he’d want to do something like leave bullets behind that say “deny”, “delay”, and “depose”.
He sure as hell didn’t leave those bullets there for the CEO to read them!
Ask yourself: “Why did he leave them there for me to read them?”
What’s your speculation? “It’s obviously a disgruntled customer who was upset about a claim being denied, delayed, and then, presumably, the guy had to sit through a humiliating disposition”?Report
So it is wild speculation because you are very bored and want life to be like a Hollywood thriller. Got it.Report
John Q is a hell of a lot closer to your theory than it is to mine.Report
I am not making any speculation.
We know he was murdered and it is more likely than not intentional homicide. We know a decent amount about the suspect’s time in New York and his route into and out of New York.
But an intentional homicide, even a very planned one, is very different than a “professional hit.”
Everything else is the internet speculating in decadent boredomReport
Wait until they catch him and he hangs himself in jail.Report
We’re more than 72 hours out and we don’t have a named suspect. Have to figure he’s out of the country by now.Report
What’s the usual timeline for this? Or is there one?Report
According to A&E, “For homicide detectives, the clock starts ticking the moment they are called. Their chance of solving a murder is cut in half if they don’t get a lead within the first 48 hours.”Report
No idea. It was intended as a tongue in cheek reference to the show Jaybird cited, and all of the expert sleuths on reddit who know exactly how these things work.Report
Is there a category of murder which is not intentional homicide? Like if you intentionally shoot someone but don’t intend to kill him?Report
Google’s robot says there are 4 different categories.
1st Degree, i.e. intentional and done with forethought. (This was clearly that).
2nd: A killing committed during a felony. So you’re robbing a store and your partner kills the clerk.
Manslaughter: Not the previous ones and often resulting from reckless or negligent behavior.
Justifiable: Self defense or defense of others.Report
There are forms of homicide that are not intentional, but they’re generally not classified as murder, AFAIK.Report
2nd degree murder is still called “murder” even if the “intention” wasn’t to kill anyone.Report
There are categories other than “filled with rage right now” and “professional”.
Thus far it looks planned and well thought out.
Planned suggests a fair bit of time. Well thought out suggests relatively high functioning and not a random lunatic.
I can think of somethings which would have made his escape go better but I don’t post “how to commit a good murder” ideas in public. However it looks like he had a plan, followed it, and thus far it seems to have worked.
We can speculate on his motives, but typically we’re wrong so maybe we shouldn’t.
The part that suggests it’s not a pro is I’d think a real professional wouldn’t want to end up in the national news with entire departments looking for him. Killing a CEO openly in public can reasonably be predicted to do that.
The cops have the resources to solve close to any crime. They just don’t have the resources to solve all of them.Report
I don’t think I’ve seen this point yet, so I’ll add:
It’s also not just whether the facility or specific provider is in network (and all the chicanery that can result as laid out above). How something is coded or labelled can add an extra layer, e.g. is treatment for an eye infection medical or optical?
That comes out of an anecdote that was more provider-side, just to be clear.
It’s not only insurance and it all forms a system that makes you play bureaucratic roulette whenever going in for anything other than a routine checkup (and god forbid they find something during that checkup).Report
Vox breaks down the anesthesia thing.
Anesthesiologists pulled off a master class in propaganda here.Report
As of midday today, Dec. 8th the NYPD officially has no idea who this person is, or where they are. Should that be a surprise? IDK.
If you a looking for a long but legit engaging read of the US 2016-2040 that includes street shootings of CEOs and SCOTUS, suicide bombers in nests of the elite, cults, the climate going nuts and truly good people trying and sometimes succeeding in making things better I can recommend Stephen Markley’s “The Deluge”.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60806778-the-delugeReport
One hopes they’re just being quiet about what they know.Report
Loved I when I read it earlier this year.Report
We deserved a break today:
https://www.aol.com/police-questioning-man-pennsylvania-ceo-164500918.htmlReport
I suppose this puts paid entirely to Jay’s assassin theory. No way would a professional fail to ditch the weapon somewhere between NY and PA.Report
I thought that he was a professional assassin.
Instead, he’s Italian.Report
And a Unabomber fan.Report
Uncle Ted has all kinda fans, though.Report
Oh he is very weird: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/15384537d52214a05e27bc5990ca54a7547b1a9002e2217cc9e584359764c8a5.pngReport
Maybe it’s just going over your head. Sub-replacement fertility in advanced economies is a real problem, especially in East Asia, where TFR is close to 1, meaning that each generation is about half the size of the last. And it’s not only a problem within those countries, where an ever-shrinking labor force will have to bear a heavy tax burden to support an increasingly long-lived and politically powerful elderly population, but also for the world. Our deepest pools of human capital are all drying up at the same time.
It’s not clear to me that the wide availability of cheap simulacra of sex and romance, by reducing men’s motivation to get out there and try for the real thing, is a major causal factor in falling fertility rates, but it’s not obviously not a tenable hypothesis.
“Look at that weirdo saying something that hasn’t been endorsed by the New York Times, NPR, or (ugh) even the Atlantic” isn’t the dunk you think it is.Report
One of the non-crazy JD Vance coded ideas is (maybe much) higher taxes on the childless. Or at minimum we need to be able to acknowledge that the way entitlements are currently structured is going to lead to a big free rider problem, and talk about how to respond.Report
“One of the non-crazy JD Vance coded ideas is (maybe much) higher taxes on the childless. ”
aka “tax breaks for parents and families” which we’re already doing, and is one of those ideas Democrats keep proposing and people keep deriding as “subsidies for BREEDERS who are FILLING THE PLANET TO BURSTING”.Report
What we have now in the form of a few thousand dollar deductions per child isn’t really pertinent. I’m talking about something like actually having them pay more into social security and medicare. Assuming those programs or something like them are still in place after the
vampireser I mean boomers finish up the bonanza that’s been their lives, we’ll have a situation where my kids are also supporting my childless peers. And while I love them all very much my investment* in the system is and will be more than theirs by orders of magnitude, none of which has been reflected in the deductions from my paycheck.*Cue Marchmaine to show up and remind me of how sad my contributions have been, comparatively.Report
I say all policy should err towards mangnamity rather than pettiness.
When we begin indexing our social programs as we inevitably shall, let us instead *add* to the benefit output according to the number of children you’ve contributed to the commonwealth.
Now, if you want to ruin magnanimity with TechBro EA nonsense, you can base future benefits on the actual output of your children… i.e. your social security isn’t based on your contributions but on your children’s contributions (plus yours once your parents have passed). But that’s just mathy elitism.
I mean, I don’t think you should get less… just that I should get more.Report
Heh I too favor the magnanimous approach. And frankly the packaging of the petty approach has struck me as beyond repulsive and unlikely to lead in a constructive direction.
But, absent some near term, big changes in behavior, we need to have a real talk about what is and isn’t fair for some to subsidize on behalf of others. At minimum I am not sure it is cool to DINK or even SINK up a life of leisure, no matter how much economic activity it generates, then soak up the social security from the next generation towards whom little to nothing was contributed.Report
I agree. There’s a lot of room for revisiting policy with huge upsides to both growth and security; but I don’t think there’s a party (yet) that can navigate all the oxen that will be gored.Report
Maybe a Galleani or Sacco and Vanzetti fan?
Looking at his social media, there’s a lot of Haidt and Thiel and even some traditionalist architecture views (with complimentary links to Tucker Carlson). Seriously, just looking at his social media, his politics were probably not that far off from many here. I bet there’s gonna be an interesting “What radicalized you?” story coming out of this.Report
He seems to come from a rather privileged background.Report
The high school he went to is about as hoity toity as it gets, at least in the Bmore area.Report
Yeah, there’s a “oh, God… he’s one of us” vibe on tpot.
Friend of a friend of a friend notes that he was on the wrestling team in high school and had back surgery.
So there is an alleged connection to health care there.Report
Maybe he’s mad that the health insurance company didn’t push back hard enough on his doctor’s request to approve a risky surgery that’s often no better than physical therapy.Report
Smarter people than I am noticed that he was 26… which means that he was no longer on his parents’ insurance.Report
What tpot?Report
TPOT stands for “this part of twitter”. It’s one of the nice ways to refer to a part of twitter that overlaps with what is also called “The Intellectual Dork Web”.
Essentially, it’s the engineering/San Francisco/AI/Methods of Rationality/Scott Alexander Back When He Was Good part of the web that shares the traits of High Openness and Low Agreeability among the self-diagnosed Asperger’s set.
The big arguments are over where the limits of the Overton Window are and whether they extend to, for example, Aella (you don’t want to know) or 0hp Lovecraft (you also don’t want to know).Report
One of the ideas rattling around the TPOT community recently is “girls need to be more forward because guys have trained themselves out of the notion that they should hit on anything female”.
Which, apparently he did pull his mask off to smile at a pretty girl who was being mildly flirtatious, and that does leave me wondering how the day would have gone if she’d written her phone number on a piece of paper and shoved it into his hand. (Maybe not any differently, and not her fault, but someone who thinks there’s a good future waiting makes different choices in their life.)Report
I feel like he’s one of those “a dumb people’s idea of a smart person” guys, who thinks that since Smart and Worthy people look a certain way and have certain books then if he looks that way and has those books it means he’s Smart and Worthy too.
Out West he’d have ended up in MIRI, here he went for something a little more active.Report
I think he was fairly smart given the handful of things we know about him and he was fairly driven given another handful of things we know about him and chronic pain drove him crazy.
“You can just *DO* things!” is a mantra among the Dork Web.
And this guy was an engineer.
He accomplished little and prison will do even less for his chronic pain… But if your main goal is emotional catharsis at the cost of moving the ball, well… we can see all of the saliva generated back when we thought that the killer wouldn’t have problematic tweets undercutting his bold act.Report
I think his politics are off the wall inchoate.Report
I grew up around a lot of amateurs who would have done a better job.
than this strunz.Report
And take the cannolis.Report
No remotely respectable Italian would have gotten caught with the gun still in his possession. Not with 5 days to throw it into a river, estuary, or possibly a bay.Report
Same with not-so-respectable Italians.Report
I feel like there’s some confusion over the weapons; the “ghost gun” he had when they found him was different from the one he’s holding in the photo of him shooting Thompson.Report
TIL that this classic line was apparently an improv and suggested by the actor’s wife.Report
I understood taking the cannoli — who wouldn’t? — but why leave the gun in the car?Report
It’s a metaphor.Report
What’s a metaphor, and for what?Report
He was told to leave the gun and the violence behind and take the sweet domesticity into the future.Report
It’s a message to the cops that this was a mob hit and they shouldn’t look too deeply into it.Report
They couldn’t tell?Report
The guy’s twitter/X feed seems to show that he leaned pretty far to the right. He was a fan of Musk, Thiel, failing fertility, social media corrupting society, and concerned about young men like him.Report
He also has a six-pack. Definitely not a lefty.Report
Heh, vibeshift incoming.Report
Listen I can have a six-pack or enjoy beer and pizza. I’ve made my choice. Though the suspect seems to love McD’s.Report
Are we talking beer or abs?Report
Report
Beer!!!Report
Lest we forget Richard Jewell.Report
I’m thinking more Jared LoughnerReport
There’s a blast from the past.Report
The suspect in the CEO murder is a weirdo: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/15384537d52214a05e27bc5990ca54a7547b1a9002e2217cc9e584359764c8a5.pngReport
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/dca5009a143108a6573be473871203379c62eae5cae6ce61a45f7a3b096ca5b7.png
The alleged murderer also hates modern architecture and agrees with Tucker on the point. He appears to be a total nut.Report
The alleged went to UPenn.
Trump went to UPenn.
Elon went to UPenn.
It’s that simple.Report
The alleged suspect appears to have undergone some back surgery which changed him. Perhaps a lumbar-fusion surgery. I generally see this kind of surgery performed on much older people.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/65e569077ad3392b126467fb04334e94b75c7bf4206fa1f0d2aca59e71152754.jpgReport
When I broke my back three weeks shy of my 18th birthday I was told I’d have to have it fused by 40 because the disks would degenerate. The ortho wanted to do it then, but thankfully my parents opted not to. 13 years past my expiration date and it’s not always easy to move but better living through chemistry and I haven’t had my back opened up yet.
There can be reasons for this at relatively young ages.Report
In which Phil H praises Big Pharma.Report
Dude really? You’d prefer I’d be in pain to maintain some purity bonafides? Wow.
Sod off.Report
I’d prefer that you not have an ideology which creates a conflict between the two.Report
when you do get it done, make sure they actually do it instead of just pretendingReport
I must say, it is incredibly lucky (If somewhat expected due to what side actually encourages violence) how all the recent assassins are either right-wing or just loony or incoherent politically.
Not only will it make it harder for fascists to use it as an excuse to crack down on the left, but it sorta innoculates against that possibility if eventually someone on the left also does it.Report
You mean like the Palestinian protester who shot a couple of kids in California?
Nah. It’ll just not get covered or get covered as “disturbed man commits act” without touching on stated intents.
Look to see whose manifestos get printed and whose get withheld.Report
lol
old and busted: this was clearly the result of Republican Trumpist support for heartless profit-focused businesses refusing to pay for actual doctoring and leaving people to die in the street, it’s only natural that right-wing policies would lead to this kind of violence!
new hotness: this was clearly the result of Republican Trumpist support for private gun ownership regardless of mental condition, it’s only natural that right-wing policies would lead to this kind of violence…Report
The majority of our assassins are lunatics and incoherent politically.
The majority of our civil disorder and the occasional accompanying riots is from the Left. If you are looking for “excuses to crack down”, look there.Report
We found the true culprit:
Report
The imposter has been found.Report
I always knew that Live Action Role Playing was going to corrupt the youth.Report
My 7 year old plays it!Report
Yes, well, keep an alert eye open for Werewolf games. … there’s no walking back from that.Report
A manager invented this game in order to figure out how his engineers would lie to him.
Hats off, gentlemen. Hats off.Report
Sales manager: how can I make a game that will determine how much he will over-promise and just how much he will under-deliver?Report