They could figure out how to divvy up their 65 life sentences.

Why do they get to pay their way out of this?

> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling [2] "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations."

Corporate laptops are backed up, with backups offsite. I find it hard to believe that the only copy was on his laptop.

From the tweet [2], which has a screenshot of an email presumably sent by Martin Elling, he looks to be directing everyone to start deleting criminal evidence.

> McKinsey's payment, which includes $2 million paid to the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, settles federal civil and criminal charges against the firm and includes a "deferred prosecution" agreement. Under the civil settlement, McKinsey is not admitting liability. A copy of the deferred prosecution agreement was not publicly available at the time of publication.

Given the opioid deaths in 2022 alone, McKinsey should be dissolved and the responsible parties serving jail time.

Can someone explain how this [3] is presented as a win, when only money has changed hands. They paid a fee for aiding in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Does this ruling now shield them from any criminal repercussions at the state level?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-...

[2] https://x.com/CoruscaKhaya/status/1676330070472814593

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...

Not defending anyone and maybe McKinsey is different but I have never had a corporate laptop with built-in backup. I am always left to figure that out on my own.

https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...

Specifically

https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/docs/#id=skbm...

In an email

    from: Jeff Smith
    to: Amir Golan
    cc: Arnab Ghatak

But Martin Elling (very much his senior) can only get a maximum of 1 year [2] as per the plea deal.

> A former senior partner at McKinsey, Martin Elling, has also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice for destroying records related to McKinsey's work for Purdue, according to court papers. He is scheduled to enter his plea on Jan. 10.

[1] https://www.globalindiantimes.com/p/mckinsey-opioid-122024

[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/consulting-firm-mckinsey-pay-6...

During a project, the live documents were on the teams laptops (local encryption). Only key deliverables were uploaded to servers, mostly at the end of the project.

Lots of cruft (client emails, unedited data, etc) stayed behind in people’s laptops.

Your laptop was stolen? No worries, under 24 hrs you get a new one in your hotel with roughly whenever you left off…

PS McK was handing out 3G - 4G PCMIA cards forever (almost 20 y ago), you were only most of the time…

Here's the thing: these firms are set up as partnerships meaning each of the partners (but really the senior partners) has their own little world enabled by their equity and voting power. They each have their own spin on the "values," risk tolerance, communication style, "followers," etc.

Trying to paint the entire firm with the same brush is naive. Like anything else, there are good and there are bad

Plenty of good smart people at each of these firms just trying to do good work and "make it." Then you have the sociopaths willing to trade lives for their own gain who have the benefit of hiding behind brand equity and human shields (aka the other partners)

I don’t care what your values are - if you work for McKinsey you are a piece of shit simple as

You can understand how the common person might think that an adjustment is due.

Send emails to your team and clients that even explicitly says "We need to eliminate documents and emails about this as the US Attorney has already begun investigating us?"

Oh well, no big deal, just have the company pay a fine.

Adjust that, for just one thing.

It's a play on words from the profession of insurance/claims adjuster, which is someone who who arrives to determine what happened and what damage the insurance company is liable for. Unlike the normal version, there's a very different twist on what kinds of damage, responsibility, and consequences are involved...

Right hand. There are these opioids have been around for decades and somehow they reached this huge level of damage. Largely the same cultures of people involved.

I still think the authoritarian policies used during COVID were a mistake. The level of compartmentalisation needed to look past scandals like this one and still force people to trust big pharma unconditionally is pretty extreme. People should be allowed to make their own mistakes based on their own flawed judgement, rather than the flawed judgement of the likes of McKinsey & Perdue. It is bad enough when everything is voluntary.

Suddenly pain management was viewed as very important by the medical establishment, while mostly paying lip service to all the long term consequences of said actions. After all you can’t actually know how much someone is actually suffering…

So, hypothetically, if a doctor prescribed me opioids I should be allowed to say I don't want to take them? Even if the manufacturers assure me it is safe, effective and they have lots of evidence of the same. Because to me that seems like a logical conclusion. I think that should be a general policy. People should be able to overrule doctors on the subject of how they are treated.

You don’t have to do anything your doctor says.

During COVID plenty of people chose to not listen to advice about vaccines and did not get vaccinated (and some did die from COVID for their efforts).

No one was ever forced to take a vaccine. Nor were they coerced by the state.

You don't have the right to demand that they cater to your requirements.

I do not believe you.

If you work for the FBI you can quit at any time and work for a different companies with different rules. You can’t work for a company that gets to ignore minimum wage laws.

- love what I do and love the team I am on a my mission.

- have a career at fbi, not a “job” I am willing to change like underwear

- be gs-15 few years away from retirement/pension/…

you can technically say this is a “free” country and all that but it is just semantics

A career extends beyond a job means that you can transition to something related outside the FBI. If there some aspect of a job you dislike then quit.

bottom line though, the then government (which is soon to be now government) went full ballistic on us during COVID times and vaccine mandates affected many lives

So yea 98% says a lot about how toothless this all was.

When you volunteer to work for someone you’re agreeing to do what they want or quit, that’s by definition a choice. When many private employers had the same requirements complaining about overreach by the government is misplaced, it’s at most overreach by employers.

Making hard choices inherently implies options. Vaccines saved well over a million people’s lives at negligible heath impact for the wider population, that’s simply what states are going to do in an epidemic.

I think it’s interesting how many people deny that — almost as if you know what was done is morally repugnant.

It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results.

Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.

It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight.

Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.

But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened.

That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.

We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.

Good thing we aren’t viruses and have intelligence and the ability to step back and think through our actions.

There is more to life than exactly one specific myopic focus on a virus. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to believe that the only problem humans can solve for is an exactly one single virus to the exclusion of literally everything else. Massive, massive amounts of privilege to think that way, in fact.

To address the seeming contradiction. Vaccination was never imposed by the healthcare system on patients during COVID, it was required by cruse ships, schools, and yes hospitals for staff etc.

We had a great natural case study in Australia of COVID through a vaccinated population. Everyone caught it over the course of a month, the vaccines did basically nothing to stop the spread. They were pretty much only useful on an individual level which means there was never a requirement for any coercive measures.

When you look at killing thousands of people as a minor consequence you may want to rethink your priorities.

2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now. Factor in that there'd probably be between 40 and 60% uptake of the vaccine just by people being prudent and the authoritarianism was not only a betrayal of the principles our civilisation is supposed to be defending but also ineffective.

And, as the current article showcases, extremely ill-advised.

3) That logic is silly. We don't mandate people do anything special about flus and that'd save far more lives than thousands. Do you consider people who advocate normal life even though influenza exists to be some sort of malign force in society? Even COVID is still killing people. 100s of thousands are still going to die from this thing. But you want to support an abandonment of basic human rights over a few thousand maybe-deaths that can't even be detected? In the extreme, more people have been purposefully murdered to secure basic liberties than that - these aren't the sort of rights that should be casually taken away.

Many hospitalizations and deaths from COVID occurred on subsequent infections.

> 2) If catching COVID is going to kill you, by now you are dead by now.

False, that’s simply not how infection works.

Part of the difference here is viral load on exposure. Vaccines and masks reduced viral loads in the air, which then gave people’s immune system longer to react. The immune system takes time to ramp up, but so do infections. A larger initial exposure can snowball even in reasonably healthy individuals.

This is because of Delta. The original strain was substantially reduced but an order-of-magnitude efficacy jump made that moot. You’re right, however, that we should have focused on masking and air filtration since that was actually effective at preventing spread in close quarters like a school or workplace.

I am from Australia and this is all nonsense.

a) Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.

b) Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW which saw health care systems almost instantly overwhelmed. This was then causing mass deaths for both COVID and non-COVID cases. It was a public health emergency by every definition.

c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated. And that was because instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home for a few days. And even then it has taken years for the system to recover.

> Vaccines are not designed to prevent transmission. They are designed to stop people from getting seriously ill and dying.

Vaccines are commonly designed to prevent transmission. For example it is a critical aspect of the measles vaccine [1]. If a magic wand could've been waved the covid vaccines would've worked that way too, and that is why they were sold to the public as reducing transmission.

> Vaccines and lockdowns were vital in high-density areas like Victoria and NSW...

There are enough counterexamples of people and places where different trade-offs were chosen. e.g. Brisbane. To say they were vital is injecting your own opinion.

c) COVID was only allowed to spread once enough of the population was vaccinated... instead of needing to go into hospital people could stay at home... it has taken years for the system to recover.

The overwhelming majority of people were always just going to need to stay at home for a few days, even pre vaccine. The reason the system has taken so long to recover is due to the suboptimal approach we took where we elongated the period of reduced throughput through the hospital system. The effect here was threefold:

1) The backlog of surgeries needed to be cleared.

2) Many patients had worsened over covid and now required more intense treatment.

3) Preventable disease was not being caught in routine checkups etc.

[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

That’s “imposing” and it speaks to the lack of ethics in the healthcare system they joined in coercing medical treatments rather than refusing to perform treatments people were only accepting under duress.

The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system. Being unable to be an unvaccinated healthcare worker is little different than requiring people wash hands, or preventing them from walking around shooting patients.

PS: Actual estimates for lives saved is around 3 million with a fair bit of uncertainty and some wiggle room in terms of definitions. Over 1 million is basically incontrovertible, but in a wider context you need to look at the spike in cancer deaths due to an overworked healthcare system and extrapolate not just consider the individuals who get infected.

The vaccines hospitalized at a rate higher than they prevented hospitalizations and the mandates applied to groups who were at virtually no risk.

> The ethics around vaccination is it saved well over 1 million US lives without direct force, that’s a clear win by any reasonable ethical system.

Except that force was used, to restrict the rights of those who didn’t comply with mandates. And numerous atrocities have been conducted by exactly that utilitarian mindset.

You can claim you needed to violate Nuremberg, but the data doesn’t support that and I’ll continue to think you’re morally defective.

False.

> Except that force was used.

Nobody was forcefully vaccinated, and in fact 10’s of millions of Americans never got vaccinated and a vastly larger percentage of them died. The numbers aren’t even vaguely comparable.

The vaccines emptied the hospitals. Literally.

Two weeks after the vaccination (with any of the western trio, or the one China exported), the odds of people being hospitalized felt more than 90% every time somebody measured, everywhere.

The Chinese one was the "bad" one, with the odds falling by not much more than 90%. The other ones were much better.

There was, in fact, many alternatives beyond “isolation”. But thanks to society’s hysterical myopic focus and constant propaganda and suppression of information most people were not allowed to discuss them out loud.

How anybody could continue to believe what society did in response to Covid was not only okay but was the only option is absolutely wild to me. It’s a testament to the massive amount of propaganda cranked out by various governments. Their belief is not just wrong it’s insulting to the people who watched the nonsense unfold.

So even if we assume that they weight their efforts by importance that isn't particularly impressive for the COVID authoritarianism.

Undoubtedly not all the COVID measures were perfect. Some ineffective measures were imposed, and some effective measures were not imposed. You can hindsight armchair quarterback that all you want, but there’s no question the authority to impose such measures is needed. And somebody (who thank heavens isn’t you or me) has to exercise that authority with only the information available at the time, and the highest possible stakes.

The issue is more that in this case the institutions did act, in a panicky and random fashion that seems to, on balance, not have helped but rather violated a large number of human rights and good principles for no particular gain. The only policies that seemed effective were quarantines, light contact tracing, removing red tape and funding R&D. We can do all those things without unduly coercing anyone, they're pretty minor inconveniences compared to the madness that was actually unleashed.

You left out vaccinations (obviously effective) and mask mandates (somewhat effective but certainly falls under minor inconvenience) — which are pretty standard public health playbook, so I’m assuming those aren’t considered part of the madness.

The lockdowns were pretty crazy, but recall their goal was mostly to avoid the breakdown of the entire health care system pre-vaccination. There wasn’t any precedent for how to do that.

The authoritarian tactics used to impose both of those were ineffective, or at least can't be justified on the evidence. Otherwise all the people trying to justify their brush with their inner Nazi would be able to put up a good argument for what they advocated for.

Both measures failed to stop the spread of COVID, the evidence they had any effect on the number of people who eventually caught it is hard to some up with even as a thought experiment (elsewhere in the thread Retric theorised that the change in viral load would be significant, which is a weak attempt but the best I've seen so far, and also sounds hard to test for). In many cases the vaccines explicit weren't checked for effects on transmission.

Very much a scum rising to the top scenario. We saw the illiberals making a power play during COVID, they're cut from the same cloth as all the other authoritarians. They were even using the old "you're killing us" logic and people making up a you-struck-first narrative is a reasonable precursor to some really terrible things.

> the old "you're killing us" logic

The analogy falls apart when the target is a behavior and not a way to go after any innate qualities that groups of people have.

If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.

> "the right groups"

It's not about which groups, it's about how the groups are defined that makes the analogy so broken. Attacking in certain ways based on any nationality is worth a Nazi comparison, while attacking based on mundane choices is not in the same category.

> If you put people in charge who only believe in using one bad tool, they eventually use it on everyone because they don't understand how to do things in a morally reasonable way.

Does this describe what happened? What is the "one bad tool"? I hope you don't mean "authoritarianism" because that's a circular argument.

Which ironically suggests a certain authoritarian/bullying streak on the part of the person employing it.

And were never intended to.

Without a liability exemption, no company would manufacture vaccines, the government would need to step in as a manufacturer. With the liability exemption law, the private sector makes the vaccines while the government assumes the liability, which is a pretty good solution in my opinion.

> In the United States, low profit margins and an increase in vaccine-related lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the DPT vaccine by the early 1980s.[4][unreliable source?] By 1985, vaccine manufacturers had difficulty obtaining liability insurance.[10] The price of the DPT vaccine skyrocketed as a result, leading providers to curtail purchases, thus limiting availability. Only one company was still manufacturing pertussis vaccine in the US by the end of 1985.[10] Because of this, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) in 1986, establishing a federal no-fault system to compensate victims of injury caused by mandated vaccines.[11][12]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_I...

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-319

a) Nobody has ever said that pharmaceutical companies should be blindly trusted.

b) The companies only have an exemption for COVID and similar emergencies and only when the damages are not caused by wilful misconduct. The idea being that getting the vaccines out sooner would save more lives than any side effects.

Unlike in a tech company where the whole company is building a product, consulting companies are thousands of teams doing projects in a small isolated bubble.

What generates that? How much of it is consulting?

Let's assume 2,000 working hours per year, 80% utilization at $150/hr, and 40,000 employees (worldwide) — that's $9.6B.

- Executives want to do cross-functional changes. (E.g., introduce new ERP software)

- External ruthless assessment of head count and subsequent slashing.

- Body leasing. (quasi-employees that are not on the books as employees)

Mostly in medium-sized and larger orgs where there’s too much cruft.

"We can't figure out who to blame because responsibility is so diffuse, so let's make everyone 100% responsible" makes as much sense as "we can't figure out who the murderers are so let's lock up anyone who vaguely looks like a gangster"[1].

More to the point, it's unclear whether this actually applies in this case. At the very least, you can confine responsibility to the consulting engagements they did with opioid producers. The value McKinsey & Company provides in their management consulting engagements might be questionable, but it's a stretch to claim their engagements with some random fortune 500 (non-pharma) company contributed to the opioid crisis, or need to be punished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_gang_crackdown

Became a full blown addict after getting prescribed for the subsequent back injury.

She lost everything, disappeared, became a homeless addict drifting from DC to Baltimore to NYC and back, until she died of an overdose of heroin in a parking lot of a 7-11 in DC in December 2015. Her story and the impact on me and my 4 siblings is a drop in an ocean of suffering these smug assholes inflicted on this country.

This slap on the wrist is an insult to all of us, especially us Appalachians, who saw this starting in the 90s and got ignored because “hillbillies are genetically prone to addiction” as Purdue told the FDA.

united health ceo wont be the last

lot of ppl on the left mad at billionaires too

if they can shoot at the worlds most protected man

a single digit billionaire is a walk in the park probably

just like the canadian billionaire couple who ran a drug company got whacked

it aint right but ppl are big mad

The Canadian couple got whacked by a competing drug company for selling cheap generic versions of expensive drugs. Or at least that is what most observers believe although last I heard, no one has ever been charged with the murders. Before the murders, people were worried the couple would be killed because they were so good at bringing to market drugs that are much cheaper than any of their competitors, destroying the profit margins of those competitors.

Seems the left were always in favor of Luigi. I'm more surprised by the right in the US. The days just after the shooting, they were all in favor too, but after their media pundits took an opposing stance, they joined the bandwagon and are now ranting about "muh poor CEO".

Bunch of sheep I suppose.

Why is racism so much more important to the right than health care, and murdering several poor innocent people in the name of racism is more deserving of their celebration and hero worship than murdering one multi-millionaire serial killer in the name of good health care?

Daily Show Accuses Right of Hypocrisy With Montage of Pundits Condemning CEO Killer and Celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse:

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/daily-show-accuses-right-of-hypo...

Kyle Rittenhouse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Rittenhouse

Tucker Carlson projects

A film crew for Tucker Carlson and Fox Nation followed Rittenhouse during the trial for a documentary feature, against the advice of Rittenhouse's attorneys.[39]

Carlson of Fox News held an exclusive interview with Rittenhouse for Tucker Carlson Tonight immediately following his acquittal.[40] Two days later on November 22, 2021, the hour-long episode titled "The Kyle Rittenhouse Interview" released, where Carlson interviewed him about a wide range of subjects.[41] In the interview, Rittenhouse said he would eventually like to become a lawyer or nurse.[41] He also said that he supported the Black Lives Matter movement and "peacefully demonstrating".[42] Carlson introduced Rittenhouse as "bright, decent, sincere, dutiful, and hardworking... exactly the kind of person you would want many more of in your country."[43] The episode was the second-most watched since the show's premiere in 2016, following the episode on the January 6 United States Capitol attack earlier in 2021.[44] It was watched by 4.942 million viewers (up from the show's average of 3.16 million viewers) and had more than four times the viewers of any other network, leading TheWrap to state that the interview "crushed the rest of cable news" on the night it aired.[44][45] Lorraine Ali of the Los Angeles Times said the interview "canonized" Rittenhouse while categorizing it as an overly sympathetic "soft ball" interview.[46] Rittenhouse and Fox News both denied he was compensated in any way for the interview.[47][48]

Meeting with President Trump

Former President Trump announced on Sean Hannity's show that Rittenhouse had requested a meeting, saying, "He called. He wanted to know if he could come over, say hello, because he was a fan."[49] Rittenhouse, his mother, and Trump met at Mar-a-Lago, the same day the Tucker Carlson Tonight interview aired on November 22, 2021.[49] Trump called him "really a nice young man," and the two were photographed together.[50]

Turning Point USA events

Rittenhouse at a Turning Point USA event in June 2022 Rittenhouse has appeared at several events run by Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization,[51] including a panel called "Kenosha on Camera" at Turning Point USA's conservative youth conference AmericaFest in December 2021.[52] Held on the third day of the conference on December 20, the panel consisted of Rittenhouse, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, Elijah Schaffer, and Drew Hernandez.[53] During the panel, Rittenhouse said, "I think my trial was an example of them trying to come after our Second Amendment rights, our right to defend ourselves and trying to take our weapons."[52] Kirk described him as a "hero to millions," and the crowd gave him a standing ovation after chanting his name.[52] The organization arranging the event said Rittenhouse was not compensated for the 45-minute panel appearance.[52]

Rittenhouse also appeared onstage at a Turning Point Young Women's Leadership Summit in 2022, introduced as "the kind of man you should want to be attracted to" who would "protect [his] family" and "stand strong in the face of opposition from culture and evil".[54]

Podcasts

Rittenhouse has been a guest on several podcasts, including the Blaze Media project You Are Here, hosted by Elijah Schaffer and Sydney Watson, where Rittenhouse said going to protests was "not the best idea."[55] He also appeared on The Jenna Ellis Show, hosted by former Trump staffer Jenna Ellis.[56] On that show, he expressed fear of harassment and said he was afraid to run errands.[56] He denied being a racist, domestic terrorist, or white supremacist, saying he had been attacked by those who described him in these terms. Rittenhouse also said he had reached out to President Joe Biden several times but had not received a response, adding, "He still hasn't replied. So it just shows how much of a man he is to not sit down and talk."[56]

Commercialization and use of his image

While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden used images of Rittenhouse in a campaign video he tweeted the day after the September 29 presidential debate.[57] The BBC wrote the video "appeared to link Rittenhouse, without any evidence, to white supremacists."[58][59] Rittenhouse said using his image and linking him to white supremacy was "actual malice, defaming my character, for him to say something like that."[60] Charles Homans, writing for The New York Times, reported that Rittenhouse was adopted as an informal mascot of the Proud Boys and was photographed surrounded by members of the group after he was released on bond.[61]

Right-wing memes using Rittenhouse's image have spread on social media.[62] In a study of his image being used as a meme on Twitter, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology found thousands of instances of Rittenhouse's face and commentary on his actions shared through a variety of different hashtags.[63] Multiple political figures have shared those memes, including Donald Trump Jr.[64] and Barry Moore.[65] In March 2022, Rittenhouse shared a meme of himself crying while on the witness stand during his trial, manipulated to appear like he was crying about rising gas prices, which he tweeted was "thanks to a Joe Biden presidency".[66]

Rittenhouse's image has been used for a number of products and sales, including clothing, a gun sale, and a video game. Fans of Rittenhouse have continued to sell clothing with his image following the trial.[67][68] In 2020, YouTube was criticized for a lack of adequate content moderation – arbitrarily allowing videos depicting Rittenhouse which glorified violence and monetized the killings through links to merchandise – until it was pointed out by a BBC journalist.[68]

The week following Rittenhouse's acquittal, the Saddle River Range gun store in Conroe, Texas, held a "not guilty" sale and the owner posted a photo of Rittenhouse with a gun on their Instagram page.[69]

The same week, speculation on a book deal began. Attorney Andrew M. Stroth, who previously worked as a talent agent, said Rittenhouse could "easily" get a book contract over $1 million.[70] In January 2022, Rittenhouse spokesman David Hancock said Rittenhouse was considering writing a book chronicling his "unorthodox journey into adulthood".[71] He further said the discussions were in the "early phase".[71] In December 2023, Rittenhouse's book Acquitted was released, coauthored with Mark Richards and Michael Quinn Sullivan.[72] Richards was Rittenhouse's lead defense lawyer,[73] and Sullivan was the CEO of former conservative advocacy group Empower Texans.[74]

Video games

In March 2022, Swedish company Nordic Empire Games launched a video game featuring Rittenhouse called Acquitted. Described as a far-right extremist group owned by William Hahne, the organization created the game that features Rittenhouse shooting his way through crowds of zombies with the choice of 18 different weapons.[75] It was launched through the Steam hosting platform and available for $5.[75] It was not announced if Nordic Empire Games had sought permission to use Rittenhouse's image.[75]

On June 23, 2022, Rittenhouse announced a video game called Kyle Rittenhouse's Turkey Shoot, developed by Mint Studios, to raise money for unspecified future media defamation lawsuits.[76][77] The video game, which features a cartoon Rittenhouse holding a bright orange gun with the aim of shooting turkeys that represent the media, has no stated release date.[78] In a social media advertisement for the game, Rittenhouse described the media as "nothing but a bunch of turkeys with nothing better to do than to push their lying agenda and destroy innocent people's lives."[76][78]

The right wing are so thin skinned and hypocritical and allergic to facts, sheez.

Luigi used a gun to murder just like Rittenhouse, so why aren't you whining about his second amendment rights being violated and 3d printed gun being confiscated by the cops? He didn't even eat anyone's dogs or cats, just some McDonald's hash browns.

Get it together dude. You seem irrationally angry to the point of defending blatant hypocrisy and racism. Why does my criticism of it personally hurt your feelings, hmm? Go play Kyle Rittenhouse's Turkey Shoot game about shooting journalists to blow off some steam.

Look, we're doing it now.

How do companies like McKinsey get away with this?

Money. Any other questions?

He's also not old money or especially supportive of old money; he's just some script kiddy who scammed his way to the top on the back of the kind of confidence that tends to only come when you're built like an NFL lineman but can also read documentation. The seethe is easy to understand.

Joe Biden just pardoned his son from crimes that would have gotten you and me in jail already.

Similarly, your Clintons, Bushs, Blairs, Bidens, Trumps, none of them or their friends and family will ever see a day in jail no matter their crimes. That's influence money alone can't buy. Those are the 1% of the 1%. They can kill or pardon people, start and end wars without answering to anyone.

Kim Dotcom is a nobody compared or those guys.

The only crime there is evidence he committed is never prosecuted against regular people, so it's the exact opposite of what you claim.

It was a witch hunt from the start.

It's like asking why money didn't work for Bernie Madoff but it has worked for Jake Paul and other crypto scammers. Bernie stole from the rich.

Because of judiciary, regulatory and congressional capture, of course. This means you it's gotten away with unless someone like Luigi martyrs themselves.

> Today’s resolution marks the first time a management consulting firm has been held criminally responsible for advice resulting in the commission of a crime by a client and reflects the Justice Department’s ongoing efforts to hold actors accountable for their roles in the opioid crisis. The resolution is also the largest civil recovery for such conduct.

> Additionally, a former McKinsey senior partner who worked on Purdue matters has been charged with obstruction of justice in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia. Martin E. Elling, 60, a U.S. citizen currently residing in Bangkok, Thailand, has been charged with one count of knowingly destroying records, documents and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct and influence the investigation and proper administration of a matter within the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Elling has agreed to plead guilty and is expected to appear in federal court in Abingdon to enter his plea and for sentencing at later dates.

…

> Elling faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine up to $250,000 for the obstruction of justice charge

All I ask is that the leadership of McKinsey be treated to that same standard. Let their golden parachutes be literal.

The broader cultural impact of them (and of the war guilt) imposed on Germany landed fairly well, though. Unfortunately, it is possible that it might have landed less well if the punishments actually fit the crimes.

Observe and contrast it to Japan's take on its war guilt, and the unwillingness to confront its responsibility.

Yeah, Martin Elling made 2 million in political donations over the years: https://www.businessinsider.com/mckinsey-company-oxycontin-d...

> During the past two decades, Elling has spread nearly $2 million among dozens of federal-level political committees, almost all Democratic. The political committees of President Joe Biden and dozens of US Senate and House candidates have benefited from Elling's contributions.

Viewed in isolation, the atrocities committed by these men deserve punishment. But in the bigger picture, the function these trials serve is for the institution in charge to be able to say "see? We do hold ourselves accountable" even though the vast majority of war crimes went uninvestigated and unpunished.

More heads, and more important heads, should roll. Not just that of one fall guy. Tens of thousands of deaths every year, and even more lives ruined. But we all know what side the US government is on, so I'm not holding my breath.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings

Well... have you seen the news lately?

Opioids are just the most obvious and egregious example of how the system is abusively hostile.

Hunter Biden pardoned, Trump’s convictions not resulting in punishment, high ranking executives getting bonuses for layoffs, etc…

My bad. I see you were disagreeing with the poster sarcastically.

I keep reading people who say, over and over again, that the war on drugs is a failure and that it's a mistake to try criminally prosecute suppliers and send them to prison. People will always find a way to get the drugs if they want them, we're told.

But then I see the same people turn around that McKinsey is responsible for millions of deaths from the opioid crisis, and the execs involved should be held criminally responsible.

It's hard to reconcile the calls for criminal prosecution against McKinsey execs with the argument that drugs should be legalized and that we shouldn't go after other suppliers of drugs.

Life long customer.

That’s BS. OxyContin addicts tend to experience withdrawal symptoms before the recommended 12 hours is up, they also develop tolerance, so they end up requiring larger and larger dosage with increasing frequency. You’re not going to sustainably live a long, happy and productive life even if you have a cheap, steady, relatively clean supply of it.

Both would be heavily regulated if they were new prescription medications.

I see the claim made often, it even commonly pops up on HN. The claim is that the War on Drugs is a failure, because any prohibition efforts are doomed. Laws against a substance merely push it into the criminal sector and don't actually disrupt the supply. So the only outcome is that we get more crime and suffering, but the amount of people using the drug doesn't change.

We saw a similarly argument often used when marijuana legalization was being discussed - legalization wouldn't actually impact the number of people who used the drugs, because prohibition laws don't stop people from acquiring a substance. Naturally, the validity of marijuana legalization goes well beyond it's impact on the number of users, but there were many claims that it wouldn't impact the number of users.

Of course, one can make the argument that the War on Drugs is a good thing but that it's implementation has often been wrong (for instance, that there should be more effort made on going after suppliers rather than users). But it's very common to see people claim that any attempts at prohibition are doomed to failure and cause more harm with little to no benefit.

Edit: To give an example, here's a HN discussion where most of the people are in favor of fully legalizing all drugs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424099

humans will do drugs. you have to start there. no matter what you try and “prohibit” this is your ground zero. from here you can decide which policy has the greatest chance of “success” once you define what success means to you.

People get these mixed up and use them interchangeably but they're very different. There will (and should) never be heroin shops that look like Apple stores like there are for weed.

Decrim can be for production, distribution and possession but people generally use it to mean possession. That means that possession of amounts for personal use are not a criminal matter, which makes sense if we see it as an addiction that needs to be treated. In that scenario, production and distribution can be (and often are) illegal.

There are other nuances in how to handle decriminalization in terms of social services offered and how to disrupt demand.

Ignoring everything else, do you really fail to see how bribing doctor to lie to people about the nature of highly addictive drugs is different from a consensual transaction between two adults?

Patients typically have to trust a doctor; the definition of consent in those circumstances is very strict, side effects have to be declared etc etc. Any abuse of that consent, like in this case, must be treated like a crime.

Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.

> Whereas when it comes to individuals deciding on their own to experience something, it's all about personal responsibility.

The problem with this framing (and some of the other comments have used this framing as well) is acting as if other drugs would not have the same issues as opioids. But if anything, the opioid epidemic has shown the opposite to be the case - people irresponsibly push drugs onto people even when access is limited to a group like doctors who are supposed to be well educated and discerning.

    > blue collar crime

They were one vendor the company worked with.

The company broke rules. The DEA failed to fulfill its mandate. The FDA failed to limit the companies promotion.

Most of all, doctors wrote prescriptions they shouldn’t have. They knew opioids are addictive. They knew Oxycotin was addictive, it’s in the FDA label. No patient would get their hands on it without a doctors approval.

So all in all, I’d say the penalty fits the role they played.

The role of a state and it's laws is to control and limit these companies.

A lot of people think it's good to assassinate the CEO of an insurance company, but then I ask, where are the checks and balances, where is the state?

If you have to have insurance, the state has to make rules where it's almost impossible for the insurance company not to pay the necessary actions (like in Europe).

With McKinsey...what did the FDA do wrong here would be my first question.

Don't hate the companies, criticise the state (who is the responsible blob to keep a society healthy).

Exactly.

Capitalism without rules ends up with situations that we would like to avoid as a society. Thus the government should step in create guard rails and enforce them.

The government, through the FDA and DEA, played a large role in the huge increase in the abuse of Oxycontin during the 90's.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2622774/

When OxyContin entered the market in 1996, the FDA approved its original label, which stated that iatrogenic addiction was “very rare” if opioids were legitimately used in the management of pain. In July 2001, to reflect the available scientific evidence, the label was modified to state that data were not available for establishing the true incidence of addiction in chronic-pain patients. The 2001 labeling also deleted the original statement that the delayed absorption of OxyContin was believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug.19

Elites never face personal consequences beyond fines, maybe expect when they defraud investors.

If you want to kill people and get away with it, just form a corporation and have your CxO and SVP staff make decisions that kill people.

Note this only works for indirect deaths. If you form a corporation and then order a hit on someone, that's still illegal and you'll still go to jail. If you form a corporation, build a coal power plant that follows all regulations, and the particulate pollution sends a few hundred people to their early deaths that's fine.

As long as housing and mental health remains an open issue, personally I'd rather have them consume stuff made by an actual pharmaceutical company at pharmaceutical grade instead of completely unregulated dark market stuff that can have absolutely wild (and deadly!) swings in dosage, even from the same batch.

The only way I think we could hope to stem the tide of this level of corruption is through education. I believe it's really in the ruling classes interest to keep as people as dumb as possible though, so I don't think it will happen.

Not sure what else the alternatives could be. Societal collapse?

Much better for it to be a part of the system. Jail for criminal executives.

> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." DOJ officials said Elling has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice for destroying those company records.

You might've been too busy trying to force "inculpating."

This is some mental gymnastics.

It was pay a fine or go to jail, but at best, the parent's comment was still wrong.

When you look at pentagon leaders and afg/iraq or Wall St CEOs and 2008 gfc or the Pope and the peado army or linux kernel maintainers and serious security bugs found everyday the commonality is Complexity.

No one is fit the more complex things gets. So even though we get Tahrir Square once in a while, decade later we still have Generals in charge.

Scaling has become easy but scaling without unintended costs and consequences the past few decades have shown is complex.

How should society collectively administer punishment to a large complex network of individuals with varying degrees of power and involvement? Reparations and the Nuremberg Trials / Tokyo Trial come to mind for WWII Axis powers. 500k deaths from opiods (taken from top comment) is comparable to the casualties from WWII, within a soberingly low amount of significant digits. Japan was occupied and could not have a military for some time.

Curious if there are other ideas of how to tackle punishment of businesses (not Luigi'ing it).

People want simple and quick solutions. And they dont like answers they dont want to hear. Specifically about what behavior is rewarded and incentivized. As Veblen pointed out a hundred years ago, the flaw with Marx is not that there are exploiters and the exploited, its that there is the Leisure class and everyone else who given a choice wants that lifestyle.

The entire media and edu system promote consumption, wealth and status accumulation 24x7. When you are constantly hit with these signals punishing a few people here and there is just for show.

Start at the top. Move down. Heavy is the head, as they say.

When the big bucks go to the very top for a successful year, the penalty should also go to the very top when shit hits the fan. When the CEO/CIO/COO's bonuses are on the hook, I suspect you will suddenly see a great urgency/importance being assigned to doing things correctly and greater penalty being levied down the ranks for doing things wrongly.

These people had too much carrot, time to balance it out with some stick.

Are you saying that is not happening now?

Please explain your previous statement you posted on that topic, which I asked you to explain but you failed to answer, because I really want to understand how the twisted minds of people like you work, and how you justify such extreme cognitive dissonance and cold blooded murder.

You could have other forms of accountability sure: freedom, life, and so on. For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.

Try to design an alternative though, go and actually give it a try. And you are immediately going to find several historical anecdotes where your idea had gone horribly wrong.

Sorry, but in which universe? The people who're responsible for harming millions almost always get away with a fine that can be brushed away as the cost of doing business, and they almost always reoffend precisely because they never have to face justice.

Meanwhile the working class people who haven't harmed anyone regularly get arrested and go to jail for nonviolent offences. If I made $50k a year and killed 1,000 people by poisoning their water supply, do you think I could escape arrest by paying a $1000 fine? Would you feel like that's an appropriate level of accountability if I knew that my actions were killing those people?

In this one. I'm just describing what the situation is, not whether it is a good system. How else would you get events like this one?

I agree, and it's already the case if it can be determined and enforced.

Do you see the issues in trying to enforce it in a heavy handed manner though?

Maybe a small aside..but it’s very interesting how we as a society took very little learnings from the Crack epidemic during the early years of the Opioid Crisis. It is frustrating how people would rather bury their heads into the sand and reaffirm existing biases vs interrogating the contributing factors.

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinse...

"More than 645,000 people(opens new window) in the United States have died from overdoses involving opioids since the epidemic began"

https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/connect2health/foc...

https://www.trialguides.com/products/from-good-hands-to-boxi...

For years, the government and court systems have been unable to punish these private corporations. At best, give them a slap on the wrist with these fines. People are tired of this bs. It's no surprise a large majority of the public didn't give 2 shits about a nobody health insurance CEO getting gunned down in the streets but rather unified around the idea of our shitty healthcare system.

Bad advice could have been thrown out by management, but instead, was accepted, and executed on.

Shouldn't the blame rest on Purdue directors and the board?

Wtf? We live in the dumbest possible universe of all possible universes.

I'm probably casting a wide net since my sample size is large, and I'm sure there are great consultants at these places who have spent more than a few months on something, and could do good work in tech or hardware. But so far for me it's something like 1/70.

Maybe I'm just that asshole interviewer.

Do they give money out at these lunches??

Some people have argued on HN that the consultants are cya and political support for things the management class allready know they want. That seem about right.

That is the most valuable job in virtually every profitable industries including tech.

They described it as up or out where you really have to grind long hours and the career is in sales and management not as a consultant really.

The sales and management part only really comes in after you’ve passed the team manager level which is fairly advanced.

That is an interesting comment. I think you are right. Probably more of a baseline competency but extraordinary 'soft skills'?

I meant team manager as included in 'sales'. Where I've worked as consultant (warm body, not a real consultant) team managers were essentially sales people.

And luck, tbh. It’s not too different from a typical org except career velocity is fairly fast and does not depend on vacancies opening up above you.

I know that I have only so much brain power to spend a day. I can work longer, but at best you're going to get more grind, not quality.

I keep wondering if these consultants could accomplish as much in fewer hours if they weren't so intent on being the one who puts in so many hours.

I know almost nothing about what they do so I'm just guessing. But I find it hard to square so much effort with results that don't seem to merit it.

It is easier to work longer hours when a hotel takes care of everything for you, but if you’re bragging about how little sleep you get you’re just teetering on the edge of burnout and American Psycho neuroticism.

Flanges up well after "Ready. Fire. Aim!"

I don't think strategy advice is worth much unless it's coming from people who stuck around and lived with the consequences (i.e, tested their ideas against reality).

I disagree with this, but I definitely understand your argument. I just don't see how someone who oscillates back and forth from various clients, even if they're all in the same industry, can get enough deep background to be able to coherently make recommendations about business strategy.

Still is though right? Just now you have enough experience to be wise enough to know what is important.

Most immoral company on the planet smh

with a trunk of a big ol' live oak tree

He hurt me this morning with the bright sun light

I'm gonna sue Jack Daniels for what he did to my face last night!