Lori A. Beer was the CIO at the time. Now at JP Morgan.
Make decisions to harm others, don't be surprised if it blows back in kind. Golden Rule is there for a reason. Treat others as you would have them do unto you.
If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the law force you to return it? One way of interpreting your scare quotes is that the executives turned a health insurer into a law violating company.
Obviously there are burdens of proof and this is most likely not possible to prosecute (it sounds like the health insurer has already shrunk and based on the date of the anecdote above, I’m guessing the relevant statutes of limitations have expired.
The general answer to that is: it depends on a lot of factors, but sometimes yes and sometimes no. The specific answer varies between jurisdictions, I think even between different US states and certainly between countries. It's often relevant whether you knew or should reasonably have known at the time of purchase that the property was stolen.
To be clear, I'm not expressing any kind of personal opinion here - I'm saying how the world actually works. Sometimes that matches what you are advocating, but sometimes not.
Of course, in both the mindset you advocate and in the other mindset, you have a claim against the person who stole your car, for sure, as well as anyone else who knowingly trafficked in the stolen goods.
Sometimes the relevant rules are different for real property vs personal property, and sometimes it matters whether the property's ownership has been registered in some register which the purchaser can verify before purchase. I don't think US car title records are generally publicly verifiable.
It's also usually relevant how the property was stolen - theft in the sense of actual larceny often has harsher consequences for the eventual bona fide purchaser (and more protections for the original owner) than if the property was stolen by fraudulently inducing the original owner to sign a deed of sale.
I'm avoiding giving specifics here because, again, the details vary by jurisdiction and by the particular facts and circumstances.
Remember, every person working for an insurer has unparalleled access to data on what the effects of their decision is going to be. You can't claim ignorance once you've seen the glorified spreadsheets that run these companies.
Not really; attainder occurs when you're convicted by a legislator as opposed to a judge.
But true, attainder is not directly related to kin punishment.
For people in specific classes that benefit from networks and status: it is not.
It should be default. If you abuse your power and position, it should have cascading effects not just for you but people that benefited from it.
This idea that only one person at fault when there are 10's of people that hide behind the crime is just non-sense and has done immeasurable damage to society.
And I stress again: it should be income bracket/class based. The higher you are, the harder the fall.
Go after the guilty party and revert whatever benefits they got. If money went to dependents, that money is to be seized. But those who received the money are not at fault per se. Unless they helped in the crime, then they are obviously guilty too, but not of receiving fund but for helping committing a crime.
You can even see the evidence in many of the sister comments here.
Loopholes and lawfare are the tools of the corrupt
Laws are like code: It only seems perfect until it meets the real world. And the complications only seem frivolous until it's your ass on the line.
We really don't in reality. The manner in which even the existing laws are enforced leaves a lot to be desired.
Propensity to do harm through crime, violence, etc. is largely a genetic attribute.
Take a violent drug lord for example. Do you really want a woman capable of loving him allowed to continue on as if nothing happened?
"ever again"
For good reason, modern law systems rarely issue punishments that last a lifetime. People can and do change, and something stupid (and illegal) you did 30 years ago shouldn't be held over your head today. These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes. For anything else, you receive a punishment, be it money or months/years in jail, and after that, you deserve a chance to live a life without ongoing punishment. Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
Obviously fining you 5$ for stealing 100 is not gonna work.
Not to punish per se, but to prevent them from doing more harm to the public.
The solution is not harder punishments for those that are punished, but punishing more of them.
Punishing more of them is easily said, when the crime is much harder to prove than shoplifting for example. And I'm skipping the fact that the shoplifter will be represented by an overworked public defender while the exec has a team of lawyers lined up that probably are payed by the company that got richer off illegal behavior
No, it's not. We don't catch everybody guilty of petty theft, but those we do catch still don't end up in prison for life.
There was a time when we chopped their right hand off, but I'm glad those days are behind us.
(Reading many of the reactions here though, we are just a thin layer of judges away from mob rule.)
You do understand how the petty theft criminal represented by a public defender is at a disadvantage to the white collar criminal with an army of lawyers paid by the company?
"We should just catch more of them" is like saying we should just solve our energy problem by making nuclear fusion work. Sure, everyone agrees with that but that's just wishful thinking
Petty theft is done for different reasons to white collar crime. I agree with you that the punishment is not a deterrence for small offences.
I think there's a lot of deterrence coming from the Enron case where people actually went to jail. That's just too rare because you quickly get into questions of intent. And to prove intent is really hard.
Your note about 'proving intent is really hard' is kind of the underlying reason - white collar criminals tend to believe they will never be caught/convicted. So making sentences more severe for those who are caught and convicted doesn't actually impact those future criminals, because their calculations say there's no risk of it being applied to them.
If you tear apart whatever guarantees human rights exist on your places just so your can impose unreasonable punishment to nobody, then don't act surprised when somebody else uses it against real people you sympathize with. (And yeah, if you are from the US or some other place where lifelong punishment is common, you should be fighting to fix this, not to add support to it.)
On the other hand, you could be pushing for those people being punished at all, by reasonable crimes that your law probably already recognizes or that could be added without rotting your society. But yeah, maybe that's too much.
On the one hand I don't want the bar to this discipline raised. On the other hand, I don't want people like us (metaphorically) building bridges that tip every two hundredth car into the river.
(source: https://www.mpts-uk.org/-/media/mpts-documents/dc4432-guidan...)
White collar crime gets basically no punishment, and looking at career of those people they usually end up falling upwards.
For such cases banning them from being in a management position for X years would be a nice discouragement.
I mean the article literally says the engineer could have been sent to prison for 75 years for his role in the fraud(effectively a lifetime sentence).
execs and upper management who instigate such incidents? almost no real punishment ever happens.
> Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
Like, seriously? These people do not feel bad, there is no heavy burden. They are proud of how they earned money, feel like any prosecution is grave injustice and would do it again.
Widely immoral people, whether in politics or business, dont feel sorry for who they are. They made those decisions because there was no moral dilema for them.
Others who want to earn money and are likewise ambivalent about the means will see a felony conviction for causing grievous public harm in the pursuit of giant piles of money as an endorsement and hire the "reformed" exec at the first opportunity.
In other words, once you've carried out your sentence, in 99% of the cases it's done and behind you, and you can go on living a normal life without anyone else needing to know.
Not sure how that's relevant.
In Türkiye, certain crimes disbar you from running for election (and you're required to have a university degree).
And say its 2 17 year olds, and you take nude pictures to send to your partner. Now, having sex is legal here, but a picture? Thats possessing 'child sexual assault imagery'. Nobody would think 17 year olds are 'children'. Even the law routinely charges them as adults.
And getting a felony at all follows you around, unless you can pay the danegeld to have it removed. Of course, staying clean isn't sufficient. Paying $10k or more is.
I happen to disagree. I think these crimes (and many others) should follow you more or less permanently.
My opinions on what "should" be the case have just as much validity as yours.
Please be self aware when you are making baseless moral claims.
A bit of self-awareness would suit yourself well. I didn't make any moral clas, baseless or not.
Or do you just claim this because that's your gut feeling?
If "targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext" is accurate - I'm curious how that compares to the absolutely worst crimes to you.
If you are saying that twentysomething founders should not be held accountable for the mistakes of their "youth," then you might be inclined hold the investors personally accountable for funding them--similar to parents being liable for their teenagers' driving mishaps.
I am disinclined to believe that Javice and his ilk are very much corrected by the Department of Corrections or later life experiences.
And it is absolutely reasonable that a crime committed in the course of your profession could prevent you ever working in that profession again.
People don't really care about drug addicts and gay folks, though (there's a fairly significant number of folks that think they "deserve" it), so it didn't get as much attention.
I used to work for a large drug distributor both pre and during the opioid epidemic.
At the time (pre-SUPPORT Act), distributors weren’t required to notify the DEA about anomalous ordering so we didn’t provide data to law enforcement unless they sent a subpoena.
To increase profits, we identified our best customers of opioids and updated our inventory tracking system to send rebates and early warning notifications to providers so they’d buy more earlier.
Each provider has a sales rep (territory) mapped so we could figure out bonuses easily.
We the software engineering team were paid well for it, but not as much as the sales reps who got a percentage of the buy.
In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has in fact been established in court as well.
As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they were so ignorant, naïve, or unintelligent that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy it.
Sure we could say it was obvious they were pushing lots of pills. But this was a legal product.
Someone working for an NFL team trying to sell tickets , or for Starbucks trying to promote frappucinos, … these actions seem fine. We know the risks, but we acknowledge and move on.
But if it turns out that new data, 3 years from now, shows some huge uptick in head injuries among college players. Or high school. And we can attribute this to the influence of pro leagues, well…. The actions of the people participating in the enterprise now get considered in a different light.
Or if we gain new (as if we need it) data on the impact of sugar and caffeine on young people, then people who work for Starbucks or McDonald’s or basically any prepared food business, … we will judge them differently ?
People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.
What do we do then? Refuse to take any action for fear of some possible future negative impact ?
It’s not appropriate to judge this way. We learn as we go, and we can say “if we knew then, what we know now…” but it’s not clear in the moment. A difficult line to draw.
In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it anyway! By the 1920s–30s, it was already well known in medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's abhorrent was where industry executives and some government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of the harms.
Patient took medication and were responsible for their health.
Doctors wrote the scripts and have the ultimate responsibility to the patients.
Pharmacies dispensed the medications as instructed by the scripts.
Big Pharma (Sackler) makes and markets the drugs.
Distribution is only responsible for making sure drugs arrive efficiently to their location. I would work for a drug distributor again if the pay were better.
Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
I appreciate the reply none the less.
You mentioned targeted rebates, which feel a lot more "active". My personal ethical barrier seems to be where its a direct interaction with the problem domain. e.g. I'll work on a tool for email marketing, which incidentally gets used by gambling orgs, but I wouldn't work directly on say, Roulette software.
A bit of an ironic statement, given that this post is you blaming everyone except yourself for the role you played in deepening the opioid crisis to increase profits.
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.
I tend to agree too. It’s incredibly hard to do much in the US without bumping into some ugly part of capitalism because the ugly parts constitute the majority.
The exact same question can be asked to developers who help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper into addiction.
I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.
But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be able to sleep at night either. Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it (whales), you know you're being immoral.
The “occasional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I associate sports betting with the much more dangerous side of gambling than any kind of P2W system.
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
The former almost certainly causes much less societal damage than working for a pharma company that strives to get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the scale constraints that come with running an underground business vs. an "above board" one.
Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the industry average for the required skillset?
Because luckily there are many other people with me who won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of candidates and need to pay more.
Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities. Just different degrees of bad.
Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work the average person does.
Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta is also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means earning less. I've done so myself.
I reported it and quit but they managed to stay in business and keep getting government contracts.
One of the disgruntled doctors from that company made a whole website about some of their fraud: https://hiller.whitecollarcrooks.com/
They also bragged to us about how one of their daughters was dating a Glassdoor exec and had him take down all their bad reviews.
I guess there are some differences though. When a new pusher shows up in your territory you sue him, not going for a drive by.
Too many people are trained to not rock the boat and not ask questions. I'm always "that guy" in pretty much every meeting I'm in. Some people like me, but many don't. It's tough. On the occasions that all my questions are already answered or I have nothing more to say it's obvious how relieved people are. It would be so easy to just be a yes man and please people all the time, but I just can't. It's easy to see how selecting for people who aren't like me would lead to an organisation that is essentially psychopathic.
I guess my point is: why is gender at all relevant here?