It is a bit scary how people seem to genuinely be OK with violence (see this reddit thread [0]). Is just me or does it feel like the overall "temperature" has gone up.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1shugf8/firebomb_t...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1shugf8/firebomb_t...
We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% of why XYZ died but when you scale that out, you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder.
I think the younger generations are increasingly aware of this disparity in justice. If you find it hard to understand the celebration of violent vengeance but don't feel the same inability to understand the celebration of Jeffrey Doucet's retribution, then perhaps you are lacking the sociological imagination.
Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime".
Things have deteriorated lately, and the population does not see the justice system as effective.
It is completely expected that we see vigilantism, but it is in no way extrajudicial.
The way they "delay, deny, defend" as a matter of course shows a lack of a good-faith execution of the insurance agreements, to the point that a sane world would understand it as extremely obvious (and documented!) fraud. Sure, it is de facto not fraud, but tell that to someone who didn't get insurance payments which they were owed to pay for life-saving treatments (or, I guess tell it to their grave).
He said "white collar mass murder."
The implication here is that it is wrong even though it is not currently illegal.
> Maybe [...] Brian Thompson [...] you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder.
Nope. Read it more carefully. It's two separate sentences.
The US is a very litigious society and Americans more than any nationality I've met are way too quick to conflate legality and morality. My personal guess is that this derives from a long running lack of class consciousness that is present in most other nations
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
Fascinating study. Thanks for sharing!
Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories).
The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it).
What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time.
So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans.
Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off.
Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate.
Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money.
The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3].
[0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978.
[1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web.
[2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives.
[3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.
Glorious as a personal sentiment isn't exactly how I'd describe the French Revolution.
Yes, stirring up anti-AI hatred is fine as long as it's directed at your I-Banker/PE friends from school who majored in economics, but totally bad if it's directed at you since you majored in Comp Sci (the source of AI to begin with) and went into tech.
"Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans"- is this how you think finance actually works? Maybe first learn how things work before inventing your own terminology or "notation" like sign-flip institution. It's not worth 20 IQ points if it's wrong. The younger generations (and I am a member) are certainly no smarter or wiser than previous generations. Many sure seem to think they are though.
2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill.
Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.
> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"
There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.
I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.
> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process
This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.
I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.
Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.
Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.
You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.
Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.
On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.
The axioms for a majority of people right now are 1. Person X is doing bad things or leading an organization that does bad things 2. The government is refusing to address it and is actively abetting it 3. There is no way to stop this evil from occurring besides extrajudicial murder. The only thing you can suggest without breaking one of those axioms is that we must let evil happen because the alternative is worse, and frankly i'm not sure that argument is a good universal standard.
As for letting bad things happen, every time the party we don't like wins the election, we let what we personally view as "bad things" happen instead of use violence to overturn the election. That's the whole point of democracy. We show some humility and respect the majority will. We respect the process.
As for letting bad things happen, there is something to do when your side loses the election: wait 4 years. It's a very easy action to take, you know for certain there will be a change or strong opportunity for it soon. That is not true in all situations.
And what is your evidence that he was personally involved in any of these alleged crimes? He's the CEO of a huge bureaucratic entity. He plays his own highly limited, even if high-profile role. He probably doesn't even know what's going on in 99% of the company.
Before going as far as taking his life, you should be able to articulate exactly what he did wrong, how he is culpable, etc, and back your claims with objectively compelling evidence At least try to mimic the judicial process before taking such drastic measures. That even this bare minimum isn't being done by the mobs of people cheering on his cold-blooded murder shows a basic lack of regard for justice and human life.
And no, it doesn't work that way at all. I have problems in my life, stemming from government laws, that I might have to wait 80 years for any government to fix. It's likely everybody does. If everyone resorts to terroristic violence because of such problems, the very foundations of society would fall apart and we'd see mass suffering far greater than anything people experience now.
From a "we live in a civilized society" perspective, I can see why some people are outraged about his killing.
Finally, looking at the balance sheet of his accomplishments, I can also see why the pitchfork crowd is cheering.
"purpose of a system is what it does"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I sometimes wonder how many of the "outraged" are really just people who don't want to be judged for what they've done too.
More of a mass murderer in my eyes, but I'm willing to be wrong on that point.
The bird’s eye view of a health insurance policy is that you have some amount in premiums coming in, some amount of administrative expenses, some amount of profit/loss, and the rest is claims going out. As a percentage of premiums, the profits and expenses are pretty tiny. The reason for claims being denied is making the numbers balance out so as to not have the insurance company risk going bankrupt (insurance regulators tend to want insurers to be only writing policies they expect to make money on on average as insurance companies going bankrupt is bad for other policyholders). If you have a policy where you pay more in premiums, you can expect to have more claims approved.
The big reason healthcare is so expensive is not so much the small profits made by insurance companies as the large costs from providers (some is profit, some is remuneration for well paid doctors, some is having more expensive facilities or equipment or treatments than necessary). You could imagine a world where the insurance company is more of an agent for the patient, trying to avoid providers overcharging to keep premiums down, but that’s not the world we live in. There don’t seem to be good competitive pressures to reduce the costs from the providers. If you compare this to places where people often pay out-of-pocket for healthcare, providers can be much more conscious of this, eg for dental work there can be a choice of having a tooth removed, and then various different qualities of filling that can cost different amounts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist%2C_Stick%2C_Knife%2C_Gun
People become okay with vigilante justice when they see the executive branch as compromised, just look at the insane plot/ending of the film Singham.
Many people see this happening in the US. We should expect to see more vigilante justice and organized crime if we see the executive branch as having a significant principal-agent problem.
Pam Bondi said Epstein's black book was on her desk ready to be released, and then a month later she said it didn't exist. She couldn't have been telling the truth both times.
The camera in Epstein's jail cell "failed" for the exact two minutes he was (supposedly) killing himself before magically starting to work again.
Congress told the DOJ to release unredacted documents, and they said "F** you" and released redacted (properly redacted, even) documents any way.
But you're asking a random guy on HN for evidence that there's a cover up and crimes going on. It's pretty clear the powers that be don't want the evidence released, or it would have been already.
Why are you lying about this? How does it benefit you?
It takes less than a minute to find this claim disproven in detail https://www.wired.com/story/the-fbis-jeffrey-epstein-prison-...
The idea that the cut happened when Epstein was supposedly killing himself is something you invented yourself, not something even remotely supported by evidence.
GP invented the claim that the timing of the missing footage happened to coincide with Epstein’s death.
That’s not an unimportant detail! If their claim was true, that’d in fact be credible evidence that Epstein was murdered.
I don’t think the sources matter, you won’t find a single vaguely credible one that supports the crucial claim here.
That seems totally unsurprising to anyone who has ever worked with real CCTV setups, they’re flaming heaps of garbage from garbage suppliers set up by garbage contractors.
Yeah, I'd totally let that guy manage my billions after all that.
Religious institutions had some access to legitimate violence in a way that the state couldn’t control. Once authoritarianism gave way to more democratic governance, that effectively disappeared.
What does that even mean?
I have not seen something like this in this significants, vibe and presumed statement in western media. There are a many examples of uncelebrated murderes of “the bad guy” which the hero does not want or does “against their will” but I have seen no western examples of this kind of celebration of killing the bad guy.
Organized crime is also going to escalate as the economic squeeze continues to hit white collar workers. Pumping out a bunch of computer science graduates and rendering them unemployable isn't going to lead to all of them giving up and working at Walmart. A certain amount are going to figure out that they can make a better living by going black hat. Likewise for all the office managers, etc. who are put out of a job as belts tighten. Threatening the livelihoods of people who were led to expect a certain standard of living and who can organize and exploit systems is exactly how you end up with organized crime. Doubly so when the burden is falling on the young, who have more appetite for risky decisions.
And the growing class divide in the USA I think is the reason why folks are increasingly seeing violence against the upper class is seen as the only option.
Again doesn't mean it makes it right, but it explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon.
Genuine question: is it?
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/09/nepal-gen-z-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revolut...
> [...] not defending [the people who "seem to genuinely be OK with violence"]—or even Luigi (the one who carried out the violence in question)— [...]
> Mangione is a murderer
Are you trying to rage-bait people?
Luigi has been accused of the shooting, but there's discrepancies with the possibly illegal search of his backpack and the body cameras of the police were turned off for 11 minutes which raises suspicions of planted evidence.
Unlike the UK, expressing opinion is inherently legal here. What would be illegal is lying about specific facts, or expressing opinion based on secret facts you falsely claim to have. However, the standard for damaging a public figure, which Mangione certainly is, is very high -- Mangione would need to show "actual malice" (that is, that the speaker knew or should have known they were making false statements).
It's an interesting exercise to compare these threads.
My own position on the matter is the not an edgy one: political violence of any kind, is never justified, but it does signal that something deep in society requires a change.
* one exception being defense of life and limb.
The optimal amount of crazies getting off the porch at any one time is not zero much like the optimal amount of fraud is not zero.
I'm genuinely curious about how you reconcile this with the world around you.
Isn't really political. By my reading the clause also invalidates the entire amendement soon as the US aquired a standing army, but I'm not from the US so, who knows.
The phrasing in total is far more vague than what you’re presenting.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about ICE, everyone in the comment threads says they don't like ICE. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
- Go onto a Reddit thread about Trump, everyone says they don't like Trump. That's the obvious statement, not edgy.
Why would we think the Sam Altman thread is any different? I unfortunately think the Reddit thread might be the real deal, or at least a little more real than you are saying.
"causing a fire to an exterior gate" doesn't lead me to believe there was any chance of real harm.
When people feel that law and order do not protect them, some eventually will go "the extra mile" (somehow managers always like this phrase). It's not something we can prevent. It is human nature. I guess super riches really like AI because this gives them extra protection.
Could you explain what packages are and what depends on (what?)?
> Historically violence has been a very...effective tool.
This is dramatic sci-fi for anarchists of all political stripes.
The critical reality to understand is that violence is the most ineffective tool, causing catastrophic harm for others and outcomes that the perpetrators rarely control or foresee. Revolutions can overthrow status quo power but what follows is rarely what the perpetrators aimed for. The same happens in warfare - the outcome is rarely what anyone envisioned at the start, a fundamental lessons that experts try to teach hot-headed amateurs that think warfare will solve their problems.
It also establishes violence as legitimate - usable by everyone else too, a very bad outcome and the opposite of the rule of law, incompatible with freedom; it elevates violence and destruction over life and liberty. In contrast, the American Revolution was founded on principles of freedom and law (for example, in the Declaration of Independence), did not embrace violence as desireable, and laid it out for example in the Declaration of Independence.
The most successful societies have freedom, the rule of law, and allow violence only as a last necessity to restore freedom and the rule of law.
Packages = ways to "adapt" to the challenges of the world.
Rule of law - in this case, international law - has governed the Strait of Hormuz and relations between the US and Iran for decades. It's not magical or fantasy at all, but a very well-established and effective mechanism that has been the foundation of the most peaceful world arguably in human history. There is no valid argument that it doesn't work (saying it hasn't worked 100% of the time is not valid).
The Trump administration explicitly aims to destroy that rule of law. I think that's why they attacked Venezuala, Iran, civilian boats, etc. Stephen Miller advocates that power, not law, rules.
You can see the outcome when international law was used, and the outcome when it is intentionally destroyed: Look simply at the Strait, which had free navigation under international law, despite the extreme emnity between Iran, and the US and its Mideast allies.
And now, with international law under assault, free navigation has ended. To be clear, I don't only mean the US's and Israel's attack: Developing nuclear weapons would also violate international law, and maybe so does developing highly enriched fissile materials (e.g., uranium). I'm not sure about sponsoring insurgent proxies in other countries, but that has long been practiced by many countries, including the US and many in NATO.
The rule of law allows societies to function. We don't want the world or our communities to function like failed states - those people are poor, starving, and brutally oppressed.
It's not just Trump. Trump and Biden both shredded the rule of law for Israel. I think both parties being captured by a genocidal foreign government has caused mass dissolution with the ability of the US to act within any framework that brings justice.
That's pretty rich, since the United States only exists thanks to systemic, deliberate violence on a mass scale against the local population.
Enlightenment and industrialization created societies that were fairer, wealthier, and more free than anything before. They also created ideologies such as communism and nationalism that killed hundreds of millions. If your ideas are good and successful in the long term but create poverty, suffering, and feelings of unfairness in time scales people care about, there will be violence.
Compromises are the key tool in preventing violence. Unfortunately, the word itself carries negative connotations in too many languages, making effective compromises less likely.
Especially when the answer to every "well why doesn't it work this way" you could possibly ask seems to come back to "state violence has put its thumb on the scale of society". The government or "the ruling order" or "the system" (whatever you want to call it kind of brought this on itself by taking so much crap under it's umbrella
The ugly, uncomfortable part is that when a certain fraction of people decide violence is the answer, a tipping point is reached and that's what happens. Historically, people have reached that point en masse without a great deal of provocation. So for a society to remain successful--or to remain at all--it needs to prevent this tipping point from happening. Force alone can't do that.
But under an authoritarian regime, it doesn’t matter whether what the state does runs contrary to statute or constitution because there is no one who has both the will and the ability to enforce any restrictions against the state.
What to you mean historically? Violence backs every government decree from speeding tickets to the maximum water flow rate of urinals.
Overwhelming violence is something that people will go to amazing lengths and spend nearly all of their economic surplus to avoid.
If you call one violence but the other is okay because there are some layers of misdirection in between you may have to reconsider your ethics.
Temperature is certainly going up, but it definitely hasn’t reached historic levels yet lol.
Useful work like generating mountains of deepfake misinformation?
Because Anthropic just lost their US government contract (AND got slapped with a completely false order that prevents them from working with any government agency) because they wouldn't do the above ... and then OpenAI slid right in and said "yeah, we can do that".
Are you joking? What civilized society? A society that let people who can't afford insulin die? Let kids starve if they are from poor neighbourhoods? What civilized society are you talking about? The one bombing countries left and right and financing a genocide? What civilization is that? A society where people with full time jobs live paycheck to paycheck with no savings? A society where millions cannot afford shelter and where homelessness is a crime? What civilization is that? When is it OK for you to revolt?
Or I missed a hint and you’re dehumanizing them?
Theres example after example of people in history being totally fine with violence against human beings.
We've been trying peaceful and democratic means for the better part of a century. It hasn't worked and is met with increasing levels of violence from the government. Right now, today the US government is abducting and murdering innocent citizens in broad daylight. No amount of lobbying is going to stop that.
The explicit and overt goal of this administration is to seize power and do away with democracy. No conceivable democratic process can stop that. Peaceful protest doesn't work, the government kills people when they try.
Every means of peaceful protest is met with extreme violence and suppression. And the violence keeps escalating.
People are resorting to violence because violence against the people is escalating. If you can't see that, then you're the problem. If you think violence is inexcusable, then you must also think that peaceful protesters deserve to get executed in the street.
We are already in anarchy. Laws don't matter, only the whims of our dear leader. Private citizens can be plucked off the street or outright murdered with zero consequence or accountability. Dear leader can declare nuclear war without congressional oversight.
If you think violence is inexcusable, you should really read the goddamn declaration of independence. It is a fundamental human right to remove tyranny by whatever means possible. Just because you, personally don't feel threatened by the us government does not mean that innocent people aren't dying. How many citizens do you think a government should be allowed to execute for no reason? How many nukes should one be allowed to launch without cause?
Democracy has been eschewed by our government. Democratic means don't work and haven't for quite some time. Laws no longer apply to the government. If you want to argue that violence is still inexcusable, you're actually arguing for complete and unquestioned obedience to a fascist government. That's not an exaggeration of any kind, this is what's actually happening in the US right now. Democracy is over, we've been an anarchist state for a few years now.
There’s a lot of scary shit going on.
2. Robots take away jobs from Americans and the proceeds to go the owner (investor) class
3. Americans no longer have healthcare
Understand?
I can also draw pictures of how dangerous humanoid care can be, as there is a possibility in a break in the chain of responsibility. If a human medical professional messes up, you (or your survivors) can sue and seek damages directly, as well as sue the hospital and insurance system (with mixed results).
With humanoids? Currently, the bar is higher as the entity being sued is not the hospital, nor a person, or even a team. The only entities that can be addressed are the corporation the runs the hospital and the corporation that produced the humanoid. These two entities have an incredible out-sized advantage in terms of sheer delaying tactics, not to mention arbitration clauses and other legal innovations. Most injured will simply give up, which is a legal win for the two entities.
In my opinion, humanoid care will take a large amount of time, damage, and treasure to lower the costs. No actor will willingly give up their cash flow. My view may be too strong.
More likely near-term states are less rosy, given intelligence takes off.
It's worth keeping in mind that in the U.S. the health marketplace is extremely complicated and cannot be analyzed with simple demand/supply graphs.
This is to say, doctors protect their own professional interests and would never permit this.
Needless to say, we have discovered that productivity gains are not consistently converted into reduced costs and work hours.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/healthcare/2026/03/...
AI isn't needed for insurance to fuck anyone over.
You know this, stop pretending otherwise.
In the US, health insurance is largely tied to employment. Health insurance, in a personal economic sense, reduces to being able to pay for healthcare. This policy is largely a left-over of World War II era employment policies. No one is taking healthcare _away_ from anyone (strictly speaking), but the ability to be able to _pay_ for healthcare is reduced to zero when employment ceases. Accessing the safety net is a separate skillset. This skill set becomes more difficult to achieve because the political class does not want to provide healthcare for everyone, only the worthy (their loyal voters).
I grew up in and am still a member of the precariat. I am educated and doing well, but I wear a well-polished pair of golden handcuffs due to how my ability to afford healthcare for myself, and my family, is tied to employment. Politically, I _do not_ like being tied to my employer by such a chain, but my arguments to change the system have been met with quite firm push-back.
ai decisions health insurance
Also, to be clear, I don't think violence is the way to confront the oligarch sociopaths. There is clearly enough momentum to fix a lot of the monopoly / anti-consumer issues over the next 4-8 years. Assuming Trumpty Dumpty doesn't try to put our military at polling places or some other anti-democracy putinesque bullshit like that.
As income/wealth inequality grows expect class violence to grow until there is a revolution. We let rich people get too rich and this is the consequence.
Sam has so far lost say $100B so far, and he is compensated by already being a billionaire. You can see how this might lead to disillusionment with the system.
It's not that people are accepting of violence. That doesn't just happen. Societies don't suddenly turn violent against the state. This only happens when the state has failed and become violent towards the people. If you're surprised by the rising level of violence toward the state, you haven't been paying attention to the rising violence towards the people.
The US was quite literally founded on the idea that it is an inarguable, fundamental human right to overthrow a tyrannical government. The nice and polite mechanisms for doing this have all been broken, removed, violently suppressed, or outright ignored. When there are no peaceful options left, humans will always revolt with as much violence as is necessary. History shows us this over and over. Violently oppressed societies don't tend to stay that way for long, and they certainly don't become hardline pacifists. They always eventually fight back, or they die.
The rising level of violence from the people at large is a proportional reaction to the increasing level of violence against the people. The level of tyranny has recently upgraded itself from merely an existential threat to the USA as a society, but also an existential threat to the entire damn planet. Of course the people are going to get violent. They feel there's no other choice, because all peaceful options have been exhausted and met with extreme violence.
That's the consensus I see on the street: all nonviolent options have been met with ever-increasingly extreme violence. When all peaceful options are removed, you pick the only one left.
In a historic lens, it's all very unsurprising. This is how revolutions happen. This is what humans have always done when met with tyranny and violent oppression. It's only surprising if you willfully ignore and excuse the tyranny and violence against the people.
The sheer tone-deafness of AI marketing is going to come back to bite us very hard. This is probably just the beginning.
And I have no sympathy because this joker has been pushing people to the edge with his hyping.
Flip it again: as a crazy, isn’t it reasonable to enact violence against Johnny Nine Nines? If he’s so innocent, how come his house is behind two security fences?
To be a little more reductive: my house is made of gold bricks so I hired an extra-legal anti-marauder militia, but now the marauders see me as a fair fight because I chose extra-legal militia instead of cops and judges… game on and QED.
This candidate was later elected to office and in the time since has shown a continual pattern of endorsing violence. He has endorsed violent actions, told reactionary extremist groups to "stand back and stand by", defended state violence against protestors and immigrants, pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of political violence and an attempted insurrection, and recently started a war before threatening to destroy an entire civilization.
Yes. Yes the "temperature" has gone up. People have been talking about this WIDELY, for years now.
Which is very AI forward.
So the temperature has been high for a while and he's on board with it.
- High wealth inequality
- Perceived inability (or reduced ability) to get ahead and have your voice heard
- Government seen as more corrupt and benefiting the elite. Different set of rules for them vs for everyone else
- Highly polarized population at odds with each other
Ineffectual molotov cocktails are just a cry for help.
Obviously people aren't going to be happy about debt fueled spending inflating prices and crashing the economy again (for the 4th time in most young people's lives).
You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
It’s going to explode, the only question is when.
No. Nor do I think they should. But UBI, higher income tax at the top and a wealth tax for the ultra rich sound like a much better plan to me than to blow a bunch of things up.
But when I look at how the US handled previous rounds of globalization and automation, I have very sober expectations for our ability to pursue the "happy path." Still, one has to try.
Do you think the ruling elite will allow it?
Put simply: people _have_ been fighting for those things and the wealthy have fought tooth and nail against it. I don’t at all understand why anyone can be surprised when all other avenues are closed, people resort to violence. It’s literally how this country was founded.
Lol, really? You think there is any chance of that happening in this current political climate? Any whisper at all of rights for workers is immediately shot down as Godless Communist rhetoric.
The data has conclusively proven that moneyed interests prevail over the interests of the people. Every single time.
The billionaire class has enabled armed masked police in our streets, endless layoffs, basically don't pay taxes at any reasonable percentage, and basically have rigged politics with Citizens United.
Given that, I can see how people are resorting to 18th century French tactics.
Net of transfers, 60% of households receive more from government transfers than they pay in taxes.
The idea that rich people don't pay taxes is just not correct. The entire system is basically rich people subsidizing everybody else through byzantine distributional systems.
If we have a pool of $100 and I take $99 and you get $1, and then I get taxed $5 and you get taxed $0, I still have almost everything. Is this.. unfair to me?
It's in fact the opposite of what you said: everyone else is subsidizing the rich, who have gamed the system to live extravagant lifestyles. Eventually this will lead to a revolution and all us rich people will be beheaded. It's the normal outcome of this sort of thing.
Stop acting as if taxation if theft, it’s the fee that allows everything else to function.
The primary role of the state is to protect private property, why not charge by value?
On every metric, people in all income brackets are earning more on both a gross and COL-adjusted basis. It is the case that top quintile income has increased more than bottom quintile income, but a faster relative increase does not mean the other group is getting poorer.
The other very interesting thing is that there is statistically not really a "upper ranks" and "lower ranks". The majority of people in the 1% each year are there for the first (and often only) time. And a very, very small percentage of people in the bottom percentiles remain there for their whole life.
Some interesting research:
* 12% of the population will find themselves in the top 1% for at least one year
* Nearly 70% will spend at least one year in the top 20%
* More than half will have at least one year in the top 10%
* While 12% may reach the top 1% at some point, a mere 0.6% stay there for 10 consecutive years
All of that is to say, the idea that there are is some entrenched upper class waging war against some entrenched lower class is just empirically not true. If you dig through the data what you'll find is:
1. People who are just entering the workforce don't make a lot of money
2. As people spend time in the workforce, they make increasingly more money
3. When they retired, they start making less money but tend to have assets to live on
It's far more dynamic than most people's intuition leads them to believe.
I get that a lot of people think people's unrealized capital gains should be taxed, so maybe the argument you're making is something like:
"People with very large paper-gains based on appreciation of the market-value of the assets they own pay 0% taxes on those unrealized gains"
In which case, yeah, that's definitely true. But if they sell those assets, they pay taxes. Some of the taxes from those sales can be offset by doing things like donating enormous sums of money to charity. And sometimes people take loans against their equity, which is not a taxable event. Though, in order to pay those loans back, they have to sell something (taxable) or earn money elsewhere (also taxable). So loans are tax deferral...
But eventually the tax man comes for everybody.
(you are wrong)
I constantly see posts focused on high earners already paying tons of tax. They do, but this should reinforce the point that the ultra wealthy should be paying more tax. People aren’t saying the guy on £500k should pay more, they’re saying the guy with £100m in assets should be.
Eta: these data are from 2018 before the BBB
Your only noticing the "temperature" going up now is just a sign of how privileged you have been to be able to ignore war and conflict that's existed around the globe since your birth.
The temperature has not gone up. You can't ignore the flames anymore.
Thinking something should be done, means nothing is being done. The poor in france didn't start with bread riots. They begged and pleaded and asked nicely first, and while lots of people thought something should be done to help them, nothing was.
Thank you for getting over the line.
People will take actions when the threat is against their livelihood, health and homes, particularly when there is no action being taken on their behalf. Their risk assessment may be different than yours.
You are unequivocally wrong. You probably mean 'similar' instead of 'literally the same'.
no, the mob is forming at the gate, and they are starting to climb
Too bad she never said it, though.
Playing catch up with Elon.
- Some if not many jobs are at risk.
- AI Psychosis is actively tearing apart families and communities, after social media and opioids have already had a pass.
- Negative social outcomes are in the service of _making money_. Not money to pay taxes to fund a healthy society, but money for the people running these systems.
Humans that lack community, safety, and purpose will embrace more drastic means of exerting control over their lives at the expense of others, no?
It is probably safe to say the temperature has been firmly up for a while. And certain subsets of the population have come to trust their Dear Leader's embrace of violence as a solution, for sure.
I see no evidence of this. We didn’t see it after Iraq. And Luigi predates all this.
These aren’t organized political movements. They’re lone actors reaching breaking points. That don’t need a theory of violence, just access to guns and a day of mental instability.
It's only a minority of people who are radicalized, but it's a growing minority. Radical ideas are more accessible than ever for people to latch on to.
Radical views on violence, social relations, science, politics, distrust of institutions, etc are all way more common than they were in the 90s.
I’d want to see this interrogated with rigor. The alternate hypothesis, and my null, is a relatively fixed fraction of folks is more connected and visible today than before.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/01/nx-s1-5558304/poll-political-...
> Respondents were asked if they agree with the statement, “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track?”
Agree:
- March 2024: 20%
- September 2025: 30%
- March 2024: 79%
- September 2025: 70%Here's one of the posts on that thread: "I mean one thing is to use AI or even ChatGPT as a product, and another is being aware of how billionaires treat the rest of the people
As for Sam, he also has pretty controversial views for how this whole thing will pan out and how he doesn't give a shit about the consequences it might have for the rest of us. Also more recently, the whole Pentagon contract thing"
People can both use LLMs whilst having a distasteful view of the leaders of the industry.
I have a tremendously distasteful view of a lot of Silicon Valley leadership. Doesn’t mean I want them to suffer at the hands of vigilante justice.
"An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb"
- Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
Vigilante justice usually starts by aiming for the top (or a minority group, if conducted from the top). But it's inherently anarchic, and eventually attacks anyone vulnerable in striking distance. I have Indian and central European heritage. My dry bones are knowing the cost of violence and value of peace, and degree to which even those who initially embrace violence tended to wind up regretting the offramp they previously precluded.
You sound like you're trying to convince me: I am not pro-violence, but I have cracked open a history book and the same thing happens over, and over again when the masses don't get what they deserve from an out-of-touch ruling class. I briefly braved life in a very unequal society - no one is safe there. Telling a person who hopelessly feel like they have nothing to shun crime and violence while they walk the same streets as the very rich is not as effective as you think it is.
> But it's inherently anarchic, and eventually attacks anyone vulnerable in striking distance.
Here's the brief, recent timeline on anti-elite radicalization:
-2008 the Great recession resulted in corporates get government bail-outs, while regular people got foreclosed, no one went to prison. Even getting a McJob is difficult.
- 2014/2015 K-shaped economic recovery in progress. Populist politicians decide to harness the still-angry "burn it all down" demography to turn out the vote. This is what was behind the Bernie bro to Trump-voter pipeline, "drain the swamp" and all that
- 2020-2022: Covid shutdowns. Businesses get bail outs again via loan forgiveness. High inflation. Cops chill outside during active shooting in Uvalde. Layoffs begin.
- 2024: Brian Thompson gets shot; elites get shocked by public support expressed for the shooter, but don't introspect on whether they are out of touch, instead, executive protection budgets go up - problem solved! Layoffs continue.
- 2025: DOGE cuts, SV CxOs and VC class goes completely mask-off, cuts to "entitlements" proposed, ACA subsidies killed. The who's who of elites show up in the Epstein files: not a single charge is filed. AI promises to kill jobs and companies embrace it, layoffs continue. Swamp is still not drained, crypto scams go mainstream.
- 2026: (we are here) 2 citizens killed by ICE while protesting. War with Iran. Layoffs continue, now naming AI as the cause. Inflation spiking.
With all this, would you be surprised that some folk may feel the scale is thumbed against them? Elites in every generation or 2 seem to need to relearn the same lesson: keeping their end of the social contract is really fucking important, in whatever form it takes in their age: giving alms, noblesse oblige, workers rights, the New Deal, etc.
I don't wish violent ends on anyone. I'm not open to sacrificing that part of myself in a rich, historically-free society that retains peaceful means of power transfer.
Sam Altman disagrees with you about violence being bad, he just signed a deal with the same DoD that killed a bunch of innocent schoolgirls in Iran.
The US can be counted on to protect these people, just like it protected Kissinger, rather than ever prosecuting them.
The US has even threatened to invade the Hague if it were to ever try prosecuting for the warcrimes they do execute.
There isn't a justice system we can rely on anymore.
That healthcare CEO would still be alive and completely consequence-free if Luigi hadn't killed him.
No.
> It's not like they're breaking any laws
Then it’s not categorically evil. If it is, change the laws. Anywhere.
> he just signed a deal with the same DoD that killed a bunch of innocent schoolgirls in Iran
Yup, not okay with the precedent that anyone affiliated with our military deserves summary execution. Because then someone will justify the same for anyone affiliated with Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or who shops at Target.
> That healthcare CEO would still be alive and completely consequence-free if Luigi hadn't killed him
Was a middle-managing CEO within a subsidiary. The actual billionaires are doing fitness—they don’t walk the streets of Manhattan. United has changed zero policies and thus zero patient lives have been changed. Well done. Glad Mr. McDonald’s got his ab pics out for his moment of celebrity.
I disagree.
> If it is, change the laws. Anywhere.
Tell me who I should vote for this next election cycle to do that.
> Yup, not okay with the precedent that anyone affiliated with our military deserves summary execution. Because then someone will justify the same for anyone affiliated with Greenpeace or the Sierra Club or who shops at Target.
I think it's a false equivalency to draw a line between an organization that kills children and an organization that campaigns for the protection of the environment.
> Was a middle-managing CEO within a subsidiary. The actual billionaires are doing fitness—they don’t walk the streets of Manhattan. United has changed zero policies and thus zero patient lives have been changed. Well done. Glad Mr. McDonald’s got his ab pics out for his moment of celebrity.
Sure.
Hell, even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence, so I don't think it's that much of a minority. The US was founded on it, after all.
Most of it. Across the political spectrum.
> even if not to such an extreme
That’s precisely the point. There is a massive difference between doing or aiding and abetting such behavior, cheering it on, and giving into the impulse of “couldn’t have happened to a worse person” before self correcting. There are a few saints who reject the violence at first glance. But most people are in that self correcting phase, and the correction happens the more they learn about the specifics of the assault.
> even the president regularly calls for and promotes violence
To what numerical end?
How many people live in Iran, who he just threatened to genocide? How many people hold views that Trump thinks make them his enemy, including being critical of ICE? How many immigrants are in the country? It's going to be a very large number, no matter how you slice it.
But some examples: Jan 6, the attack on Paul Pelosi, every ICE agent.
Personally, I've also received multiple death threats from his supporters.
Zero dispute. I’m challenging the notion that Americans are rising to that call. (Or cheering on specific attacks, versus general notions of violence.)
In a weird way, maybe social media helps in this one instance. We can’t let the enemy be faceless. There is no glory in shooting a specific mother or nurse.
This is a problem. But it’s categorically different from vigilantism. That sort of grassroots violence is basically impossible to stop once it gets started without major abrogations of rights, at least temporarily. And we have not seen organized grassroots vigilantes taking up arms to pot Trump’s enemies. Not systematically or at any scale that doesn’t just scream gun-control problems.
You're attempting to find step 1 when we're already passed that and into step 2. The vigilantes are coming from inside the house, and the murders committed in Minneapolis combined with the government working overtime to shield them should be the primary signal.
“I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less,” the president responded. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime.” ... The radicals on the left are the problem. They’re vicious, and they’re horrible,” Trump said. “And they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports. They want transgender for every one. They want open borders.
“I always say, we have two enemies … We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries … We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard—or, if really necessary, by the military.”
He reguarly referred to January 6th insurrectionists as "hostages" and "patriots" then gave them all a pardon. If you breach the capitol and interrupt election processes, injure/kill police officers, and chant "hang Mike Pence" then I guess you're a patriot worthy of a pardon.
The job market's shit, it's nearly impossible for young people to buy houses or pay rent, well paying jobs are disappearing to AI, inflation is sky rocketing and people are getting desperate. But then we're told the economy's doing great and billionaires like Musk and Altman are rolling in money.
All this violence against the innocent in various places and levels, and you think it’s weird that people are fine with violence used against a billionaire conman?
But where people are "OK with violence" is with state violence.
State violence include police violence (>1000 people are killed every year in the US by police), prison violence, violently rounding up immigrants and putting them in concentration camps, criminalizing homelessness, denying people life-saving medical care, evictions while landlords collude to raise rents, genocide, sending random people to a maximum security prison in a foreign country (ie CECOT), mass shootings, going with a firearm to a protest to instigate an incident and get a legal kill, intentionally creating the opiod crisis and so on.
For a large number of people some or all of these incidents will get a reaction somewhere between "thoughts and prayers" and "no, it's good actually".
Compare the state's reaction to one healthcare CEO being murdered and the perpetrators that are implicated in the Epstein files. Epstein himself was known to authorities since the 1990s and got an absolutely sweetheart deal in 2008.
So I'd say the real problem is what people view as violence and who's allowed to do it, seemingly without oversight or consequences of any kind most or all of the time.
What kind of weird world are you living under...
They did not want a target painted on their backs or being involved with the company responsible for mass job displacement.
Let's hope that SF doesn't turn into a free-for-all after the IPOs, since the silliest thing is for everyone to move to SF and buy up the houses and then the have-not's realise who got rich.
I'd donate that money away or give the employees (who have nothing) a one-time bonus / raise like the five-guys owner [0] to not be a target.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/27/five-guys-ce...
Seriously shocked that this is the aspect of this moment in history that you choose to focus on, and not the absurd levels of violence perpetrated by the ruling classes against common people.
A: Violence now!
B: Maybe later.
The world was never a wise and virtuous man's paradise, but it has been quickly sliding into ever increasing and monstrous irrationality. Give Plato's "Republic" a read and you might find it concerning how closely we exemplify the last stages of political and social decline.