I think the response is a great comment. It really is insane that they felt the need to damn the flooded campsite.
The comment actually does a great job of accentuating the point of the story. Everyone offended is too caught up in their achiever mode mindset to truly appreciate the absurdity.
Where do I get DRM-free ebooks to put on a Kobo? I don't support breaking DRM. So I'm using a Kindle because it has the best access to and integration with almost any book I want.
I would really like a tool to reliably get the title of PDF. It is not as easy as it seems. If the PDF exists online (say a paper or course notes) a bonus would be to find that or related metadata.
There's martial law and there is civil law. Martial law applies to enemies and in wartime. In this case, killing enemies like Bin Laden is acceptable.
However, in civil law, for the state to kill someone it has to be done through the courts. There is evidence given on each side. Killing someone without this is not justice.
People talk as if it is so obvious UHC CEO was responsible for the deaths of many people but he never got to make his case. That's not justice at all.
I‘m talking about justice and what is legal and what is just are two different things.
Is it just a child rapist, who there is video evidence commuting the crime, gets to walk free because they can’t find the victim to testify in court? And yes, that is the law in some countries. The uk had to wait for someone to come back to the uk because they could convict without the victims but the country he committed the crime couldn’t.
And it’s only not obvious that he‘s responsible for a lot of pain and suffering when you ignore the facts. The accused doesn’t need to give their side of the story for people to know what happened.
> The accused doesn’t need to give their side of the story for people to know what happened.
There is always a defense in court. This is not necessarily the defendant explicitly testifying. That's what I meant by the defendant making their case.
Justice can fail in the courts, I agree. But you can't have justice without (a) an authority with the power to judge, usually the state, and (b) a court proceeding where evidence is weighed.
If you say the UHC CEO killing was justice, then you must, to be consistent, allow for other such killings. Should all healthcare CEOs now be knocked off?
> But I don’t think it’s hyperbole to consider the actions of this CEO and his company in the same breath as such evil tyrants
But it is. Tyrants round up women and children and execute them. Healthcare is more complicated because you have multiple causes at play: the health conditions of patients, the hospitals and what they bill, and the insurance companies.
Money is a big factor here. People talk as if insurance companies should spend unlimited resources on every person. I understand the resentment over wealth inequality, but someone recently calculated that the top 4 billionaires could only support healthcare for everyone for 3 months. Money is not an infinite resource. Rationing is unavoidable.
But I get that there is a problem. Automatic denials and denials over treatments that have clear and significant benefits are a problem, absolutely. And the system could run more efficiently. But we also can't avoid death due to old age or sickness. Nor painless death.
But we can avoid murdering people in the streets in cold blood.
When people are tired of a system and the powers that be, they take action into their own hands. I'd rather a few dead CEO's and a renewed zeal among the populace to address these issues, then roll over like a dog.
> But it is. Tyrants round up women and children and execute them.
That's just a difference in methods.
> People talk as if insurance companies should spend unlimited resources on every person.
You're right that US healthcare is a total mess (that's a much bigger area for discussion) but that doesn't mean that it's therefore okay for insurance companies to deliberately trade people for profits. That's literally what they do. Seriously, they could choose to make less profit, or pay lower salaries, and treat patients proportionally better. (And of course, as we all know from the reporting in the past week, UnitedHealth is the worst of all in the US for treatment denials.)
> But we can avoid murdering people in the streets in cold blood.
I totally agree; but that wasn't the argument I was making.
See, you put the caveat at the bottom, but I think you are just having a normal discussion. You aren't speaking "very confidently," you are just making an argument.
What I think happens is people who are very knowledgeable about a subject are hyper-sensitive to slightly incorrect information. And to boost their egos they like to diminish the people making the incorrect statements as not just incorrect, but confidently incorrect, a la Dunning Kruger.
See how confidently I made the exaggerative statement above? I don't necessarily mean it to be completely true, but I am making an argument. I think an assessment of confidence requires more than seeing no mollifying qualifiers like "I think" or "it might be". There's no verbal tone on the web.
It was a little meta-joke, but I think the world could use a lot more expressions of doubt. Very few things are certain or universally true, and those that do tend to have Greek letters in them. I find highly confident people highly suspicious, and a culture that rewards overconfidence and punishes doubt both exhausting and dangerous.
The comment actually does a great job of accentuating the point of the story. Everyone offended is too caught up in their achiever mode mindset to truly appreciate the absurdity.
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