https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kardashian
> Simpson was the best man at Kardashian and Kris Houghton's wedding in 1978.
> Following the June 12, 1994, murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson stayed in Kardashian's house to avoid the media. Kardashian was the man seen carrying Simpson's garment bag the day that Simpson flew back from Chicago. Prosecutors speculated that the bag may have contained Simpson's bloody clothes or the murder weapon.
> As one of Simpson's lawyers and a member of the defense "Dream Team", Kardashian could not be compelled or subpoenaed to testify against Simpson in the case, which included Simpson's past history and behavior with his ex-wife Nicole, and as to the contents of Simpson's garment bag.
Founding Movie Tunes?
I’m sure there’s other like her who will work on high profile cases to gain recognition.
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/judy_clarke_has_...
> Clarke would probably not want anyone to feel indebted to her. In fact, after the Smith case, she returned the $82,944 fee the state paid her, saying that other indigent defendants could use it more.
Maybe I have too low expectation about USA interface between law enforcement and judiciary, but here in Poland there were many high-profile cases of misconduct of public prosecutors that colluded with the police. The only "proven" cases were about purposefuly destroying evidence: breaking CDs that held incriminating recordings, wiping weapons to remove fingerprints, agreeing to single version of testimony etc. They used procedural quirks to prevent defence from challenging those "mishaps" (like in one high-profile case with broken CD, they argued defence-held copy cannot be submitted, because of continuous custody requirements). Cases with planted evidence were always he-said-she-said, because when police writes a search report where they said you had something, then you have no way to challenge that.
May I add, fraud around those arrest/search reports (however they're called it English) is rampant. It starts with simple things, like notifying the subject about right to attorney. They just tick a box that you declined to summon attorney, and you have no way to challenge that, other than refusing to sign the paper, act of which carries no value.
That would mean, there is a 50% chance that in general all the evidence has a 50% chance of being fake. And this is likely a bit of a exxageration.
No, not all evidence - only the one needed for the Parallel Construction.
The word equally possible implies equal chances for me. Otherwise it is equally possible, that the evidence was in fact planted by aliens.
I think “possible” has a less precise connotation than “probable” which suggests some statistics.
It’s the obvious answer as to why he still had the gun on him.
https://archive.is/2024.12.09-230659/https://breloomlegacy.s...
I'm in a similar situation with a family member and we are spending around 4-5k/month in a variety of non-allopathic strategies for this family member's health care. However, the family patriarch has drawn the line where his financial support is in providing housing, so the 4-5k is picked up by other family members.
Its homeopathy, NOT healthcare.
Perhaps what we are doing is still considered allopathic (most strategies are informed with research a la pubmed), with an osteopathic approach (whole body).
The difference here is that we’re able to eschew traditional means (dr appointment, lab test, drug rx feedback loop) of engaging with the medical system, while engaging with non-traditional health related businesses for our own care.
For example, we’re able to validate whether genetic disorders are at play by having sequenced full DNA and matching them against known genetic mutations.
We will order our own blood tests and pay out of pocket to quest, to drive decision making. Same thing a regular doctor would do, but in a far more expedited timeline. It’s a 1-2 day process test a vit D levels to determine and adjust dosing. An average doctor might be 3 weeks out for a 15 minute appointment to write that vit D lab script, then another week out from reviewing and writing the Rx for D.
4-5k a month is the cost of what someone with profound chronic illness ends up paying if they want to do their own R&D, deal with things on their own, in a manner that ensures timeliness and the best care possible. It’s a myth that access to the brightest minds (a la an institution like Mayo Clinic equals the best care, btw)
The money is merely the average in which to access the latest tests, as quickly as possible, medical equipment normally inaccessible to the general public and test and treatment options an engaged and highly trained MD that practices something such as precision medicine might suggest at the height of their careers’ charging power.
It also helps that the patriarch is a retired MD and can let us engage with the system out of band by writing scripts for medications that would be unavailable to the average public.
When lives and suffering are on the line, and we’re in these highly compensated roles, 4-5k/month is a privilege to spend for loved ones. Much of it may be lit on fire, so to speak, in personal r&d efforts, but each of them yields a win that gets us closer to a healthy baseline.
Ever since he got "caught" (if you can call someone literally telling the police where he is "the police catching him"), all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" (i.e. attempting to demonstrate that a bullet was not only fired from a given type of gun but a specific singular gun of that type) and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him. They might actually be lucky and produce matches in this case as they have the actual suspect and murder weapon (assuming this wasn't an extremely unlikely 5D chess move of using a body double fall guy and/or different gun) but both of these types of evidence are extremely unreliable and rarely help actually finding the suspect even if they make for good television when they work. As I understand it the police even walked back on the mayor's initial claim about "having a name" to "having a list of names" - not to mention that you don't call in the FBI when you already have good leads yourself (if only for optics/political reasons).
He seems to have been mentally unstable for a while before engaging in this killing and the fact he wrote a manifesto strongly suggests he had an intention of being caught or at least considered it highly likely. The monopoly money bag wasn't necessarily a "red herring" as everyone I heard talk about it interpreted it as intending to send a message, which seems to agree with the apparent contents of his manifesto (based on what news reports have cited from it). The water bottle the police now wants to use for DNA evidence may have been deliberately left there for this purpose, too.
Based on what I've heard of his manifesto, he may have intended to kill other people too but have realized the difficulty involved given that his very public first killing likely spooked the other people on his list. I think it's more likely he didn't fully plan out an entire sequence of killings or didn't account for these complications and essentially gave up, settling on being caught sooner rather than later. People generally don't write manifestos when they don't also want to take credit for their actions.
We just make enough sense to mostly get by in the world.
That said, apparently his manifesto is fairly short and honestly sounds more like a confession than an actual political manifesto.
My point is more that usually when you hear about a killer having a manifesto you expect a lenghty diatribe about what they think is wrong with society and why they think what they did helps fix it - whether it's early 20th century "propaganda of the deed" anarchists, late 20th century "fall of the West" primitivists or early 21st century "race war" white supremacists and "new crusade" Christian nationalists. Of course for e.g. Islamist terrorists you don't even need a manifesto because everyone knows the cliff notes version already (Western imperialism, Islamic caliphate, blasphemy, etc). Instead this guy seems to have largely been upset with privatized healthcare, which is a common sentiment but rarely enough to motivate someone to pull off such an elaborate stunt.
That his manifesto is pretty rushed and incomplete does support the idea that he's more mentally unstable than genuinely "politically radicalized" though. The Christchurch shooter's manifesto for example was fairly incoherent and seemed more like an elaborate trolling attempt than a sophisticated political tract but clearly some effort went into it. Luigi's almost feels like a half-hearted homework assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if he quickly wrote it after the killing on a whim and didn't give it much thought before, which again would fit with my impression that he really focused on the first killing and didn't plan out much beyond that. As someone struggling with ADHD and autistic hyperfixation (not saying either of those apply to him), I can relate.
Where is that shit now for a guy they have VIDEOS of?
Remember when osama bin Laden was staying a relatives house and not in a secret underground cave network?
This CSI/Navy seal messaging is compliance propaganda.
Remember when the US spy agencies prevented a credible terrorist plot by accidentally catching a guy in the Middle East carrying a thumb drive with terrorist plans on it?
Surveillance exists to maintain control, it can't help establish it. Dragnet surveillance exists to reconstruct events, not to prevent them. And most importantly, it all exists to suppress, not to protect. It's about dominance, not security.
I don't know about your country, but in my country if you look like the person shown on CCTV committing a crime, you're wearing the same jacket, you're carrying the same illegal gun, and you're carrying a handwritten manifesto justifying the crime?
That's enough evidence for a normal jury of normal people to convict. The cops don't really need to add any DNA or CSI woo, juries are capable of exercising common sense.
Only way there's reasonable doubt here is if the guy's carrying the first place trophy for the CEO shooter lookalike contest.
It's pretty humiliating if you have a big militarized police force and can't catch a guy who killed a big important CEO in public and then went on wearing the murder suit in public until a random McDonald's guy calls you up and literally tells you where to find him, in public.
There are so many moving parts in a situation like this that it is impossible to think of everything, and the things you don’t think of will look obvious to people after the fact. The dumb luck situations that save you or screw you can be interpreted as inside knowledge. His bumbling actions afterward from the outside might seem like a “why wouldn’t he just do this instead” without thinking about how the mental toll, stress, and panic of being hunted by the whole country could degrade your judgement.
But maybe he knew it was inevitable so he spent his last few days living life normally.
Reportedly he is smart, so he probably knows the value of a good mystery.
People watch too many movies.
This. And HN is the perfect example to observe this phenomenon.
I lost track how many highly confident but incorrect takes I read here on semiconductor topics from people who assumed they know everything about any tech topic because they earn sich figures from writing crud web software.
If you’re told that you’re a superhuman, then why not think you can get away with it?
treating everything as a market or something to be solved with a market mechanism
People that have logic training such as lawyers and engineers even more so.
(If it wasn't clear, I'm poking at the idea that we have numerous biases that prevent objective evaluation)
It needn't be most, or even many on HN, and people of all kinds vastly overestimate their abilities. It's just that on HN it's overestimating with great ambition.
(I say this very confidently, don't I?)
What I think happens is people who are very knowledgeable about a subject are hyper-sensitive to slightly incorrect information. And to boost their egos they like to diminish the people making the incorrect statements as not just incorrect, but confidently incorrect, a la Dunning Kruger.
See how confidently I made the exaggerative statement above? I don't necessarily mean it to be completely true, but I am making an argument. I think an assessment of confidence requires more than seeing no mollifying qualifiers like "I think" or "it might be". There's no verbal tone on the web.
Is it not Occam's razor that people are like this because this world of startups, "cutting edge tech", "move fast and break things", etc. gives quite clear incentives to be like this? The entire of financial world of tech is quite significantly propped up by the inertia of unearned confidence!
People can do this repeatedly with positive feedback and increasing scope until eventually it doesn't work.
And then you become the richest man in the world and buy Twitter and show everyone that you're kind of just clueless outside of your area of expertise, but putting up with you is profitable enough that people just go with it.
People think the high pay and the fancy titles* they're (often) given reflects their value or intellect*, even subconsciously, and they behave in such a manner.
*Sorry, I don't consider web programming (which comprises a majority of modern software development) "engineering"
*Many are some of the most intelligent people quite literally on Earth, or are otherwise exceptional.
There are generally two ways of doing hard things. Either you are knowledgeable enough to be aware of the challenges and work around, or overcome, them. Or you are unaware, or shameless, enough to do it anyway. The later is much easier than the former. (Then you also have those who believe they could do something but never does because they can't). (Also not entirely mutually exclusive).
Sometimes this is a feature of education, but most of the time it is just a feature of ignorance. Being educated doesn't also prevent you from being ignorant. It is very much expected that most willing to do something hard are smart enough to do it, but not smart enough to do it well. Unless it's been made easier, but then it is no longer as hard.
It is also perception. Knowing both software and hardware would make you a technologist, or when talking about hardware someone who knows hardware but also knows software. Not knowing hardware but talking about it would more likely make you perceived as someone who knows software. And going back to the beginning, it is easier to think you know software than to actually know it.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
Read his manifesto, then read this whole thread again. It's hilarious.
Thinking he’s smarter than the rest of us is most likely a big part of his identity.
You can take a person out of his ivy league STEM background but you can't take the ivy league STEM background out of a person, or something.
We innovate because we like being comfortable. We don’t want to tend to a fire constantly to be warm. We don’t want to depend on the randomness of hunting/foraging to have a full belly. We don’t want to take days and days of travel to go a few towns over. We don’t want to have to deal with people we don’t know because that’s anxiety inducing.
So we invent all those things that means many modern humans can just stay comfy, warm and fed at home with all their basic needs met without having to go through all this discomfort.
The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless (and to top it all the planet is on fire).
None of that is true. You're projecting what some people struggle with onto everyone, when the data indicates people are better off today. And mental health issues aren't unique to the industrialized world. Also, the planet is warming, but it's not on fire. Total exaggeration.
And what "data" would that be?
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/03/new-surgeon-genera...
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/24/10/wha...
https://www.bib.bund.de/EN/News/2024/2024-05-29-FReDA-Policy...
And what "purpose" are people looking forward to?
> Also, the planet is warming, but it's not on fire. Total exaggeration.
What does that even mean? It's not literally burning, so it's fine? Because you say so?
> And what "purpose" are people looking forward to?
What, you don't find increasing shareholder value compelling?
> It's not literally burning, so it's fine?
Presumably they think the climage catastrophe is not a big deal. "On fire" is clearly hyperbole but the point is that we're on a fast track to total global economic collapse (to say nothing about the death and destruction itself) as long as the answer is to carefully do some ineffective reductions and give more money to the industry to spend on "carbon capture" technology that creates more emissions in the process of being built, maintained and operated than it could ever hope to capture, but I digress.
On the one hand you have overblown expectations of success and commitment to work for men, on the other you have an expectation of submissiveness, docility and youthful purity for women, but in reality most men can't be high earners, most women need to work the same grueling hours to make a living and it all just ends up making everyone unhappy and lonely because nobody can live up to the expectations both instilled in them from a young age and placed on them by their peers and failure is not an option. Not to mention that the concept of dedication to your employer has become completely detached from the previously implied reward of the company's loyalty to their lifelong committed workers, too.
The situation in "the West" (let's say the US) is comparable in some ways, certainly, but the gendered expectations are much less intense and there are at least some options to socialize outside the work environment and as bad as labor protections are, people don't literally die at work.
Why are you thinking he's incorrect? I mean, a debate can be had if bans are the correct tool, but there is a massive trend in hospitality in general (both restaurants and lodging) to de-personalize the entire experience, to take the human service out of the loop and make it invisible where it still needs to take place:
- hotel booking? no travel agents, no phone calls, anyone can just do that themselves with bookingdotcom and other aggregator service.
- hotel on-site service? no check-in at the reception, you go to a terminal, enter your booking id, get a keycard and that's it. when you check out, you close the door, dispose of the key card, and you haven't seen or interacted with any human during the entirety of your stay.
- food ordering? you sit alone at home, scroll through a list of restaurants that might not even exist ("ghost kitchens"), a computer orders a human to make the food, said anonymous person (and maybe some colleagues) makes your food, another anonymous person gets ordered by a computer to deliver it to your doorstep, and if you specify a non-contact delivery you didn't have to interact with a single human for anything. And I think it won't take long for the cooks to be replaced by machines as well, delivery robots are already a thing.
- on site food eating: you don't order at a server any more, you order at a terminal, a tablet or even your own phone, the computer dispatches cooks and servers, some even don't have human servers any more but only robots or running-sushi-style conveyor belts, and in the end you pay at a machine.
So yes, "running sushi" is definitely a good example how human to human interactions are outright eliminated from our lives.
Unfortunately there's just not enough time in the day to really dig into the issues he's grappling with when there's an overwelming course load of databases and physics etc.
https://x.com/SyeClops/status/1866353712148685002
Doesn’t seem to me like he has a superiority complex. He is devastated by his mother’s illness and the actions of United Healthcare.
Why would someone post a typed version rather than a photo of the real thing (which they would need to have to be able to type it up)?
"many of those who participate were formerly part of the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements. [...] What makes TPOT a "post-rational" community is an interest in topics that are not traditionally rationalist, such as spirituality, occultism and conspiracy theories."
Edit: to clarify, when you go down the rabbit hole of certain bubbles, you come across terms that nobody will know unless they've gone down those same rabbit holes. Occasionally when you come up for air, you might find yourself using those terms as if they're broadly known.
I’m sorry are these supposed to be extremists? These are status quo western liberals, secular humanists, and science enthusiasts.
> retrograde
Is this a derogatory term in the human progress narrative?
I have seen this happen people do this with programming / CAD / 3D modeling / various crafts etc.
You see this all the time where people on HN, Reddit, wherever, will act as though roughing in the plumbing and electrical for a home addition is comparable in complexity and fraught with similar nuances as doing all the process electrical and plumbing for an industrial facility when it very much not.
Let's say he shuts up and gets a lawyer. His lawyer can say that maybe the real gunman noticed he looked similar, then switched bags on a bus. It's weak, but it's something.
If he tossed it in NYC, he leaves possible DNA at the scene. If he tosses it at home, the cops will likely find it and take his disposal as an admission of guilt.
IANAL but while I guess it's not good to have your lawyer run the Shaggy defence ("it wasn't me!") if the police have made an effort in the investigation then there's a surprising chance they'll find the evidence anyway.
At the very least that could be his rationale.
He didn't know if they had a van watching his house, and if his bins were being collected by the police. He might have been too scared and paranoid to do anything.
I can see someone planning meticulously the murder, the immediate fleeing thereafter but not the rest. If I remember images, he wasn't wearing gloves so he may have had to clean it before he planned to get rid of it. Plus he may have hit hiccups in the process that may have derailed part of his plans. The fact he had cash both in local and foreign money probably means he had planned to move out of the country but was kind of waiting for the dust to settle.
I’d feel more confident if he’d staked the route out for multiple days or if there was a plausible backup plan like breaking in to the CEO’s hotel or the conference.
For all we know he made 15 attempts before this.
They weren't engraved. It was just Sharpie. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/united-healthcare-ceo-brian-tho... "A source briefed on the investigation said each word was meticulously written, not etched, onto the casings in Sharpie."
> 100% sure the guy is going to be there.
One can be 100% sure the guy is gonna at least be at the conference, and humans tend to be predictable. He was also fairly likely to be at the venue the day before getting prepared.
A tremendous amount of time and effort is spent with it all riding on a few, hopefully, well placed assumptions. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Usually your acquaintances only hear about the times the hunt works out. Same with this. We only hear about it, because it worked out for the hunter
He needed a Neilsen device or piston in the suppressor to assist with cycling on the action, which he didn't have.
He's not surprised that he has to rack the slide after every shot, he knows that it most likely will not cycle and he'll have to work it manually and he reaches immediately to do it.
edit: i'll speculate and say the suppressor still worked after the shooting because he still had it on him. if it was melted or broken, he may have been more apt to toss it.
I mean he’s clearly a bright individual, Ivy League and comp sci major and all so did he study YouTube videos or something?
Conference probably had a hotel block they were booking and a link to book so you know which hotel to camp.
Not rocket science at all, just basic OSint
Waiting 15min instead of 1hr 15min was probably luck though.
In this case it was Hilton. And if the CEO stayed at Hilton he had no reason to be on the street outside the hotel where the killer was waiting for him. Somehow the shooter knew that the target is not staying at the Hilton and will be walking to the front entrance. BTW, the normal practice for high profile individuals to arrive in a car to a service entrance hidden from the public.
Because someone paid that much money stays at a fancier place, like one of the Conrads or Waldorf Astorias. Hilton's a mid-level brand.
Or, you follow him from the conference center the day before.
But they may well have arranged other, small meetings with people also attending the same annual meeting. It's then convenient to have them all in the same hotel.
It is a bit of psychological blindness where we convince ourselves that random murders aren't as easy as they really are. The truth is that almost anyone -- including people with lots of security theater -- can be nullified by random people. This is quadruply true in the era of drones.
Most normal people just have a healthy self preservation instinct, so aren't willing to accept those consequences.
As tech advances over time, this will all only become even more true.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...
547 so far this year. If we had equal justice for all in this country, this CEO shooting would have barely made local news, maybe.
Don't lie at us with statistics like that. The bulk of those so called "mass shootings", normal crimes gone off the rails and other things that are nowhere near what people think when you use the words "mass shooting", which is almost certainly the slight of hand you're going for.
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition. While what you say and like you reference is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader to portray it as you did. The typical mass shooting on that list consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime (usually a crime for profit gone off the rails or the drug industry DIYing dispute resolution) wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
Pretty much every mass shooting by the colloquial definition makes the national news. I am unaware of any one that has not.
Now that sounds like obvious selection bias. Also, the Wikipedia article says "specifically for the purposes of this article, a total of four or more victims". But the point about the categorization is well taken. As the article says: "Many incidents involving organized crime and gang violence are included."
“ A man was killed and three women were injured when they fired upon in a vehicle on eastbound Roosevelt Road near Cicero Avenue in Cicero. The victims fled north onto Cicero Avenue into Chicago where they crashed, leading to three others being injured in the crash.[16]”
^ Who would call this a mass shooting?
And in a society that strongly valued equality before the law, they wouldn’t dare treat the two cases so differently. Thus we can see that we don’t live in such a society.
How would "equality before the law" as you described even work? If some celebrity got killed and people wanted to contribute their resources into finding their killer, is that suddenly bad now? If my son got killed and I'm trying to find his killer rather than doing the Right Thing™ by devoting my time equally among all unsolved murder cases, am I a bad person?
Where? If you go by reddit, there's a "huge number of people" who want to see society collapse in a socialist revolution, but that's clearly not representative of the overall population. Even the disparity between the support for kamala vs at the polls was stark.
Justice is not defined by the law, but by personal values. The prosecutor in this case is going to be obsessive in ensuring that none of the jurors understand their legal right to jury nullification, because if they do - this guy stands a very high chance of a mistrial - if not outright acquittal.
that's... not the same thing being argued a few comments up? ie.
"Keep in mind, for this case in specific, a huge number of people did not want it solved"
I don't think it's controversial that the CEO isn't well liked, or that some (most?) people thought his death was a net good, but that's not the same as actively wanting the murder to not be solved.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/10/15/swedens-homici...
In reality, the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other. Whether it be with a legally-purchased gun, an illegally-purchased gun, a homemade gun, a knife, a homemade shank, a baseball bat, a vehicle.
Most discussion and statistics about gun violence intentionally obfuscates these facts. We could speculate about the motivations why, but it is largely irrelevant.
Of the numbers I've seen, in total gun related dealths are evenly split between suicide and homicide.
Of the homicides, ~10-50% are gang related (depending on source) and ~50% are drug-related (including overlap with gang).
F.ex. intimate partner violence being another major homicide category.
I've seen numbers on the order of 10% for intimate gun partner homicide. The percent is much higher for women, but women are a minority of gun homicide victims overall.
One surprising / not surprising other fact: ~50-75% of gun deaths involve alcohol and ~25% meth.
Since I disagree, I will offer my own statistic: the leading cause of death in the United States among children and adolescents is gunshot wound.
I think that the risk is highly concentrated on a subset of people, an individuals can take simple actions to remove themselves from that subset.
Examples would be if you steer clear of gangs, drugs, and abusive partners, your risk is drastically lower than the national average. The same is true for your kids, especially if you don't keep guns in your house.
Now, I still think it's a problem that other Americans are dying from gun violence, even if I don't think I am personally at much risk. I will admit that this does reduce the sense of urgency I feel, and I suspect that this is why the numbers are obfuscated.
The groups that want to reduce gun violence rightly understand that personal fear is a greater motivator then general concern for the well-being of others, so the narrative exaggerates the former and not the letter. This is why you get lone suicide grouped with home invasion for gun violence statistics. It is why you get 2 gang members shot in a drug deal gone bad classified with school massacres as mass shootings.
Gun suicide specifically affects white conservatives males and their kids more than any demographic. Either it’s access to guns, or conservatives are particularly more depressed (or maybe they lack access mental health services?). Having a friend die this way when I was in high school (and knowing no one who was shot and killed by someone else), it’s particularly real to me.
>the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other
Both of these things can be true. You can have a rampant gang violence problem, and also a rampant school shooting problem. The fact that the gang problem is worse doesn't make the school shooting problem okay, and to use this to argue against gun control is... odd.
Banning a right is the worst bandaid "fix" possible, on top of what is a much more fundamental problem that can't be solved by merely stopping one of its symptoms. Our people are sick in multiple ways. Let's fix that.
It's not like you can ask the courts to use state violence on the guy that shorted you come coke or to kick that other gang's dealer off your turf because he's already been warned once. Illegal industry has to DIY it.
To include it would be like compiling a list of extortion and including government fines and civil judgements. It dominates the stats so much that if you include it and evaluate it you're not actually looking at the thing you want to be looking at, you're measuring by proxy the size of something else. You'll wind up deriving conclusions like "most mass shooters are low level gang members" or "the threatening party in most extortion is the state" that is nominally true but also absurd doublespeak not actually congruent with the meaning of those words.
I don't personally care about what's going on in the DRC either, but I do care about the entire city being safe as I don't want to die from accidentally taking a left turn.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is a country, not a city.
It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence, every day, everywhere. Have you never seen a fight/argument on the street suddenly diffuse when a cop appears? Or eg, a guy drunk at a bar, starting to raise his voice in anger at someone, only to simmer down when he sees the bartender walking over because he doesn't want to be kicked out?
Awareness of consequences is a necessary precondition for people to course-correct. That's an essential feature of people: we are able to notice when we're on course toward a bad outcome (whether that's harm to oneself, or harm to someone/something we care about, or any undesirable situation), and so take responsibility for our actions in advance so we can change course. Without that we'd be amoral creatures. This is what makes us moral beings – that we can take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. This is a good thing. It's what makes us people, and it's the basis of having a civilisation that is mostly peaceful.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.
Just figured I'd throw a cite in on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
William Golding had no special anthroplogical knowledge/training, he was just writing fiction.
It's a fairly straightforward understanding. If I said I have an aversion to the taste of steak, would you require additional information to why I don't eat steak? Or, to put it in your terms, eating steak causes a negative internal state for me and doesn't require any external consequence to make me avoid it.
>It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence
There's a problem with relying on "intuitive" understandings in some cases, especially when there is contradictory evidence. I think the term for your stance is "deterrence theory/effect." In this case, I believe there are plenty of studies that show harsher consequences do not reduce crimes rates (or at least have marginal effects). People are not rational actors, especially in highly agitated emotional states.
We have an aversion to killing that goes further than the fear of consequences. It can be seen in the military, where soldiers naturally don't want to kill their enemies, even when they have incentives to do so. To be effective, soldiers have to be desensitized to killing through their training. Enemies are dehumanized, they train on human shaped targets, etc... And even with all that training, after a few years of active service, many start questioning their life choices. It is common for military pilots, who enlist for the love of flying, until they realize what they are really doing, i.e. killing people. When that happens, it is time to retire to a noncombatant job.
Punishing crime is not useless, but I think saying that consequences are the cause of aversion for killing is backwards. We have a natural aversion for killing, especially when we are in a prosperous situation like we (the first world) are now in. And that's why we take murder so seriously.
And speaking of murder, our natural aversion for killing shows when we see how we treat the death penalty nowadays. The death penalty is (generally) for the worst people humanity has to offer, their killing have been approved by the highest authority, and there is still opposition. We even have rituals to offload the responsibility of killing from the executioners. For example by having a random person in a firing squad fire a blank round.
And let's be honest. Who would take a bullet for this CEO of one of the most despised corporations in USA (that's saying something).
I honestly think, that the general distaste for this particular industry, is why the law enforcement had such a hard time catching him.
If someone is willing to live like an absolute hermit in basically a police state, hiding behind layers and layers of security apparatus, engaging lookalikes and only allowing the loyalty-tested anywhere near him, survival odds improve quite a bit.
But for anyone trying to live anything remotely approaching a normal life, or with any real freedom, your continued survival is completely due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in your world have a personal breaker against murder.
Even if you try to destroy the evidence, evidence of you destroying the evidence works just as well for a lot of cases.
The difference between those two and a non-imprisoned life is... significant.
I dont think the two are equivalent
Both can be ended via suicide, if the inmate so chooses.
If there somehow end up being Pennsylvania or federal charges against him in connection with the murder, those criminal law systems still have the death penalty.
He does currently face some Pennsylvania charges as well, such as firearms charges in connection with the encounter where he was arrested, but none of those are severe enough to warrant a death sentence.
But god forbid it's also used to treat sick people! Or prisoners.
It should have happened without death, is all.
(Even then: being a cop or the President helps...)
For almost all other crimes, no, probably not.
Even for murder, it's not entirely true; https://nypost.com/2024/12/05/us-news/teen-killed-another-wo... happened on the same day, but certainly didn't see the level of police resources involved in finding the killer. Teams of cops with drones weren't searching large swathes of NYC for those perps.
If he just shot someone randomly in a poorer neighbourhood he likely would still be free.
I redact my previous comment but leave it for posterity.
I'm reminded of the trial of John Brown. For those who aren't history buffs, John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA in October 1859, hoping to steal weapons to arm the slaves and fuel a slave revolt. He was caught and executed in December 1859. The country collapsed into civil war 17 months later, at Lincoln's inauguration. Historians wryly note that John Brown was executed for doing, on a small scale, the same thing that Lincoln did on a large scale 2 years later.
which seems pretty far-fetched to me.
But poster ablation earlier spoke of the:
"toxic stew of stupidity and sub-4chan conspiracy theorising." on ZeroHedge."
Is HN immune to what happened to Zerohedge? Some of the posts here are pretty speculative, to put it mildly.
Jurors are screened for bias, likely questions from the prosecutors will include, "Have you ever been denied a medical insurance claim?" Those who answer yes will definitely not make the jury. Lots of people can answer with a "no" quite truthfully, myself included.
(Note also that I am not making a comment on whether or not I approve of how juries are selected, this is simply how it works.)
You're right there are lots of people who can answer "no". However, it's also possible that such a cohort is not a true jury of peers, and remember that juries skew older.
It's possible that screening everyone out who answers "yes" would not be allowed by the judge for this reason. Then, the prosecution would only have a small number of "no reason" exclusions.
People who have never personally been insured would answer “no” truthfully, people who have been insured but only consumed in-network, fairly routine services might be able to answer “No” truthfully (though hiccups even with that leading to initial denials are not uncommon), and people under 26 who have only been on their parents insurance and have been shielded from the details of insurance interactions would be able to answer “No” often without intentional misrepresentation.
> However, it’s also possible that such a cohort is not a true jury of peers,
“Jury of peers” is a line from Magna Carta referring to barons’ right to have their guilt or innocence determined by other barons and does not appear in the US Constitution. The limitation on excluding jurors in the US system is that the unlimited number of exclusions for cause that attorneys for either side may request are determined by the judge on the basis of whether the potential juror has sufficient evidence of bias that would make them incapable of rendering a fair verdict, and other exclusions (peremptory challenges) are sharply limited in number, not some assessment of whether the net result is “a true jury of peers”.
That’s not a sufficient basis for a dismissal for cause, most people who have ever had insurance would answer “Yes” to that question, and prosecutors don’t have an infinite number of peremptory challenges.
So, they probably won’t dismiss on the basis of that answer alone, but do some followup if the answer is “Yes”.
One of the more sympathetic views towards the murderer is that there was no legal avenue to pursue the CEO for mass fraud under which the plaintiffs would get a fair shake. Vigilantism is more welcome by the public when it appears to be the only recourse.
What prevents the juror answering "no", and then acting precisely on this belief?
My wife's eye exam was scheduled a day early. Denied, though I'm not that annoyed over $250.
Originally I said I wasn't going on a shooting spree over it and edited it. Maybe I should have left it after all.
In the US, it will be very difficult to find people who can say no to that.
Just for curiosities sake, who did you think would win the latest US presidential election?
I feel like many (most?) people on the internet are kind of disconnected from people's everyday life outside of the internet. I'm guessing that most of the average folks (people outside the internet zeitgeist) never even heard about this assassination, even less cares about the assassin going free if they did.
I was at a party over the weekend. I asked a room of 30 people what they thought of the assassin and the overwhelming consensus was hero, they wouldn't say anything if they saw him, and if they were on the jury they would acquit. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a replay of OJ Simpson where one of the jurors gave OJ a power fist as he walked out for the verdict. It only takes 1 person to get onto the jury and acquit. Americans love a robin hood.
I'm guessing that makes it pretty clear that it wasn't really a mixed of "real Americans" as almost nothing is so black & white, especially if you compare people who live very different lives.
But, I could be wrong, it has happened before and it's bound to happen again at some point :)
I'd say the HN public is the bubble there. Lot of aspiring CEO who take the "don't care with rules if you can get away with it" message to heart so they feel like they have more in common with the victim than with the perpetrator of this murder. While I would not be surprised if it is the reverse for 90% of the USA population.
So? You'd be surprised by what many of them think about insurance companies CEOs.
Are insurance companies more liked among internet users or less liked among internet users (than the population at large)? I presume that internet users tend to be wealthier (due to more free/leisure time, better browsing technology) and less angry with their insurance than non-users, but could be wrong.
Does a hung jury not just lead to a retrial?
A hung jury leads to a mistrial. After a mistrial, the prosecution has the option of trying the case again, but it gets harder (you’ve got more time from the events, a more-tainted jury pool, etc.)
Also, if there are multiple charges, and the jury reaches a not guilty verdict on any charges, that may impact the ability to refile other charges, or make it harder to try them if they can be refiled, because any fact that the jury necessarily rejected in an acquittal is finally decided by that acquittal.
By having a filtering process before the jury is empanelled to identify that.
I haven’t gotten all the details, but something like this makes sense. It was a personal vendetta from a person out of desperation/frustration.
I guess as more details come out we will know
I'll confirm it for you right now. For me it's not just the back, it's areas along the entire spine. I've had spinal cord compression on my thoracic spine since late 2017 and nobody will touch it. My lumbar spine has many herniations and "schmorl's nodes" (where it's chipping away at the actual vertebrae) in addition to clamping my nerve roots shut. I had emergency surgery in my neck in early 2018. Prior to the thoracic spine injury, I was in the best shape of my life; very muscular and healthy with a 6-pack like you see in Luigi's pictures.
It's been an absolute miserable experience for the last 8 years. Being gaslighted by doctors before and after my surgery didn't help. Insurance tried to deny my emergency surgery at first despite the fact I lost all sensation from the neck down almost overnight. When you're dealing with trauma and the system works against you, very dark thoughts start to form. I'm not going to say I condone what Luigi did, but if you think people go through these events and don't think those thoughts on many occasions, you're so very wrong. There's a HUGE range of emotions that comes with it all. Suicide was definitely one of them for a long time as well. I have a wife and kids though and do not wish to burden them further by adding to the list of problems. They're the only things that's kept me going strong this whole time.
Overall, the options for severe chronic pain are: heavy painkillers, physical therapy, wait-and-see (hope they improve) and if not ... dignified exit.
If they improve it takes years. And painkillers are ABSOLUTELY a must during that time but the innocent monsters (largely the rest of the population that is) will cry out "opioid addiction!!!", cut them off and sadistically (in their mind, gently) advise to get over it.
I have no words how much I despise this world. It's all fine and dandy until you lose your health, afterwards you really see it for how it is.
As I get older, I understand this phrase more and more.
What sort of injections are you referring to? Corticosteroid injections can sometimes be helpful in the short term but clinical practice guidelines discourage prolonged use due to the risk of bone damage and other severe side effects. So insurers aren't necessarily wrong to deny payment for those.
Same here, except I’ve had it since ~2000 (mid-teenager). Anytime a suggested treatment makes it to insurance, they deny it because “it’s extremely uncommon for back problems of someone your age to be in the thoracic spine.” They’ll gladly pay for unnecessary surgeries on the lumbar, but refuse even many diagnostic attempts in the thoracic area.
Where he will finally get decent health care for free.
I’m curious about what exactly prompted whoever called him in to become suspicious - was the profile released from photos good enough? Or was he acting suspiciously with his backpack?
Why would he do all that if he wanted to get caught?
- The intelligent individual is also self-absorbed and believed that they would be able to continue to kill CEOs without getting caught. A narcissistic streak that allowed them to make no attempt at concealing their identity in public. They kept the weapon in order to move to a new target (or they 3D printed an identical if the reports of a 3D printed gun are correct). They believed they would either not get caught or that the public would not turn them in. They may have envisioned themselves the Ted of Healthcare.
definitely this one. there was a lot of projection of competency onto him, wanting him to be some kind of superhero assassin that would disappear. when in reality, he wasn't using that welrod pistol clone, and his gun was jamming with every shot.
but also he was self-destructive and definitely wasn't trying hard enough to not get caught. and that comes with the territory because you're not going to be well-adjusted and decide to assassinate someone in broad daylight. and i would pick self-destructive over arrogant. and he may just have not realized how distinct his facial features were.
- person clearly had meticulously planned the execution of the hit and exfiltration. Even leaving red herrings on his way out of the city (backpack full of Monopoly money). Yet clumsily keeps _all_ of the evidence that would implicate himself in this murder. Not to mention he is wandering about in public while a multi-state manhunt is underway with the full weight of alphabet soup agencies, and state and local LEOs? To me, this suggests it was part of his plan to get caught. There was no escape to a non-extradition country. The “shaking” mentioned while talking with police could just be a massive surge of adrenaline as he sees his plan unfold before his eyes. Then use the live streamed and televised court to spread his message. Then live out the rest of his life as a political figure as the media continue to analyze this persons life and motivations. Just like Ted.
- Or the internet, media really over-estimated this persons competence. It was really just dumb luck that he even escaped NYC. At that point, he was just improvising after leaving NYC. His arrogance to keep the evidence as some sick mementos or trophies ultimately did him in. Likely try to plead insanity with the manifesto. Probably fail to do so, then eventually get convicted on all charges and end up in a supermax penitentiary for life.