Hacker News Reader

Comment by HaZeust | Hacker News Reader

This entire song-and-dance from executives, media, platforms, and the general "status quo preservationists" over the last month in response to Luigi is priceless.

They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors.

They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.

View on HN

Administrators reflexively lie. They are committed to preserving whatever institution employs them, not to any objective standard of truth or behavior. I have lost count of how many times I have highlighted such behavior over the alst decade.

Me as well, but instead highlighting their lack of commitment to morals and integrity; rather than standard of truth or behavior - equally valid take, mind you!

I find it hilarious that they can't even keep their power in check to save it for when it would REALLY matter... but they just cant help themselves, they love to execute the control as quickly as it is available even though this leaves a trail of erosion.

An obvious worldwide trend of complete speech control, right in the open for all of us to follow and see. Instead of just waiting a bit longer... until there was no way to stop it (maybe its already too late?) But i feel like this is too soon to pull this trigger, we still have time to stop using all these large platforms that aren't even vital to our lives, to make open and peer to peer alternatives

Lying to preserve an institution is like playing Jenga: eroding the foundation in order to scale up the tower.

Fantastic metaphor - I'll definitely be using that.

It's not the first time they've done this. They've consistently done it with Gaza. When they do cover it at all, it's only to paint protestors as terrorists. (Yet the France vs Israel sportsball match was played to a three quarters empty stadium because that many people hate Israe now)

An aspect worth considering: everyone with a large investment in civil society is opposed to murderous vigilantism, and while that includes the economic 1%, the fellow CEOs, the Media Industrial Complex*, et al., it also includes a much more boring demographic: simple, decent folk who are opposed to violence and law-breaking.

The status quo behaviour of Stack Exchange and others is pandering, but it’s just as likely to be pandering to mom and pop as it is to Musk and Murdoch.

* tongue-in-cheek

This doesn't take away from your point, but what defines violence? I recently asked this to someone here but unfortunately did not get an answer [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566862

True but I think it just shows that this isn't malicious on their part, like journalists and politicians aren't all uniformly intentionally creating and maintaining a broken healthcare system that murders¹ thousands of people and bankrupts an estimated 650k people a year. It's rather the very natural result of their ideology, if the same people had to rebuilt the healthcare system the end result would be identical.

There is a reason why Bernie is universally despised by all of them, this is the shared ideology, its this unspoken thing that every CNN and FOX news anchor, every nypost and nyt journalist, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump all have in common. That's why this Luigi situation was so eye-opening to many people, it showed the cracks in the system. None of those people will ever be part of the solution, it's all of them collectively we need to overcome.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

Hypothetical - is it possible for someone to set up an ethical health insurance company that just takes in premiums and pays out for care? If people despise the current companies so much why can't we just start a new company, maybe as a public benefits corporation that by charter has to act ethically?

So the fun thing is that's already what happens! It's part of a law passed with the ACA called the Medical Loss Ratio rule.

I've come to discover that most people really do not understand healthcare insurance at all.

The true driver of increased costs is Dr's and Hospitals. Not insurance.

This rule magically solved all incentive misalignment in healthcare and everyone clapped.

The rule might have made things even worse, since now total costs have to go up for their profit to go up.

Contrast this with a non-profit which has no incentive to increase profits and thus no incentive to increase costs.

I agree that these conversations mainly reveal to me that many people don't understand the economics driving costs in US healthcare, since they are so willing to carry water for private insurers.

> since now total costs have to go up for their profit to go up.

And yet, they deny claims, despite that denying a claim reduces their profits.

> to carry water for private insurers.

Because insurance it utterly irrelevant to the issue. The problems in the US lie at the Dr/Hospital level, not the insurance. Procedures simply cost too much, having the government pay for them will just makes things worse because government always overpays for things.

You want to solve things? Make medical tuition free, and remove ALL caps on number of doctors (especially difficult with residency, but it can be done). Then reduce rates for services.

Someone should start a fully integrated company: They educate you, find you a residency, and hire you. In exchange for free tuition you agree to work for lower rates. (There will need to be some details to work out obviously, since you can't force people to work.)

Whatever their reasons for denying claims, capricious denials is the main complaint people have about insurance, so it doesn't really feel any better if it doesn't actually increase their profits. Out of curiosity, why do you think they deny claims of it has nothing to do with profitability? Is denying claims just fun?

It's actually comical to claim insurance is irrelevant.

Billions of dollars of middlemen creating makework inserted into the process surely adds no costs, and is completely irrelevant to how much it costs. The waste generated in hospital billing departments is free, since people famously love working for billing departments and will do it for free. Commercial real estate for healthcare company buildings is also free, and so are the salaries of all the people that work for them. Not to mention their role in creating price opacity, allowing prices to rise unchecked and having different prices for different payers, also has no effect on prices. The stress that patient dissatisfaction (or outright getting fucked) causes providers is also completely free and causes no waste.

It's a shame that these people don't read, because if they did they see just how often the rich and powerful were murdered during the gilded age. From Wallstreet to St. Petersburg everyone from Emperors to titans of industry was assassinated by those with nothing left to lose. It's almost like income equality is there to keep them alive and to keep another world war from breaking out.

But that _have_ learned. They are systematically making violence a taboo the way sex was in the past.

If all people think violence is wrong and immoral instead of just against the rules they have written ("laws"), then they can keep writing rules that suit them even more and more without any pressure against it.

Do you think assassinating arch-dukes was being sold as virtuous back then either? Especially by the churches which were the moral arbiters of the time?

Plenty of people were still in favor, clearly.

The difference is in the past most discourse was by mouth - impossible to censor and eavesdropping was costly because you needed a person to do it.

These days more and more discourse is online

- heavily censored by platform rules which are much more strict than laws, partially because it makes the moderator's job easier to err on the side of caution, partially because it teaches people to self censor which then extends into real life

- censorship can be automated and even invisible (shadowbanning, fake degradation of QoL, ...)

- eavesdropping is also automated and omnipresent

The real danger of AI or LLMs these days is not they machines will want to kill us but that powerful people will use them to mass-profile everyone and stop any dissent from spreading.

Do you think China will have a revolution and restore democracy? How? How will people organize?

And every currently democratic state will be the same - democracy only needs to fail once and it will be almost impossible to restore.

---

EDIT: Even word of mouth is in danger, sufficiently powerful organizations are or will be able to access microphones near you. Or cameras for lip reading. Again, en-masse, automated by AI.

By the Serbian orthodox Church?

https://images.app.goo.gl/dqHBEnQvy2hc6RHD8

This is them blessing the troops to go kill the Austrians a month later.

Sure, after the declaration of war by the state. The Church (depending on which definition you use) sponsored plenty of Crusades too. None of these actions are ‘rebel against the machine’.

Though that does sometimes happen, usually leading to/in the middle of a civil war.

It was a blessing for a defensive war. Serbians didn't "go" anywhere to attack Austrians. It was the other way around. But I guess you already know that. Why did you choose to write "to go kill" when they didn't go anywhere?

Except almost every blockbuster movie, rap song and mainstream video game romanticizes and heroizes violence.

Yes but try to apply the same rules to real life and people will laugh at you.

How many times do you see the hero having to choose between killing the villain and leaving him to the legal system (not justice system) to give him a lesser punishment?

This whole story was started by the fact that countless people have begun to revere Luigi Mangione as a Robin Hood-like folk hero. Whatever taboo put in place against violence seems to have failed in this case.

Yep, if you boil the frog too fast, it will notice.

When people say "staring daggers", do you think they are actually trying to stab someone?

> taboo the way sex was

Was it? the puritanical views in some western social groups is hardly how the whole world saw sex, even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class.

>"even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class."

Same with violence! Not too much institutional change made for gang violence between 13-21 year olds in Chicago - as long as they're in the same class.

I have a theory for a long time that "democracy" as a concept is pushed so strongly in the West not because it really favors people nor for its effectiveness but because it nulls political assassinations and delegitimates them. Thus it is an extremely good system for the rulers.

A system with fewer assassinations is a better system, if all else is equal. Unfortunately, all else is not equal.

Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.

Not just vote him out, that solves all his future murders. Depending on when he was votes out, he still needs to be punished for all his past murders.

Resorting to violence over other non-violent means to resolve disputes is often a symptom of weak institutional capacity, and one could argue that this instance of violence is such a symptom.

It's a tug of war between institutional capacity (people's inability to act) and injustice (people's willingness to act even if they will face negative consequences).

Any society that stigmatizes violence is soon overtaken by one that doesn't.

The west is in terminal decline and will be replaced by a cult from the middle east. This is the third time this has happened.

The only annoying thing is that I'll need to learn Arabic. English was bad enough.

Honestly, they are just playing the rulebook of "lets not get into regulartory waters". The reality is that no one on either side really gives a shit that much, as proven by recent elections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com