Dick Spence's take on the guy was accurate -- he's a kind of "high IQ midwit" who might be intelligent but lacks the conscience and mental agency to think deeply about anything. What happened with his back/mom sounds tragic but the insurers are not really responsible for that.
There is something kind of based about caring about something enough to assassinate somebody, but it comes across as pathetic and stupid in this instance. There is no evil CEO in the smoke room who is running all this stuff, it is all ZOG + incestives at play here.
What data sets do actuaries use? Do you have some top-secret databases of info that you use to drive your calculations or something? I think there SHOULD be a show about actuaries, because I feel like they have all kinds of top-secret info that I'd love to get my hands on. They know all kinds of fascinating stats. They have probabilistic and sociological/demographic data that's basically a social scientist's dream. It's too bad they use it for such a boring purpose, because my sense is that they have access to super fascinating info, just no one cares bc they only use it for bean counting and risk calculations. Am I wrong about that? Is this just a fantasy of mine? I've always felt like if I had access to the kind of data actuaries seem to, that I would be able to unlock all secrets of humanity.
though companies also have proprietary experience data and actuaries will compare that to the mortality table used in pricing to produce an A/E for the CFO etc... but it's genuinely not that interesting most of the time
99% of the job is tweaking Excel models to be compliant with regs and standards of practice. An actuary is closer to a high IQ accountant than a data scientist tbh.
Not all actuarial roles are like that ofc (consulting actuaries are a lot more capable as a rule) and the profession is ostensibly trying really hard to get ahead of predictive analytics / AI so they don't get rekt by data scientists... but it's quite hard because the field is cartoonishly credentialist so a lot of Boomer actuaries are dinosaurs who make like $300k even though haven't learned anything new since the first Bush administration.
A lot of these guys will insist on never even learning SQL, let alone Python, and insist on doing literally everything in Excel / Microsoft Access which simply can't handle big data operations in any sensible way. This in turn slows down reserve valuation and creates bottlenecks in the whole company (and then the other departments are considerably worse!)
As far as Casualty insurers, most states require yearly filings which lay out in detail how rates are determined. These filings are public. It’s not exciting, not interesting even if you’re a person who’s into numbers/data. So if your auto rates go up, you can literally find your companies auto filing and see their justification for your rate increase. It’s generally not that complicated either, and the rigorous exam ladder is essentially a method of gate keeping to keep wages high.
yeah honestly doctors and lawyers would be surprised how terrible we are at leveraging our expertise to create extractive and rent-seeking grifts
I don't know how it feels on the CAS side but the SOA seems a lot more interested in ensuring every actuary acts like Lisa Simpson all the time than doing anything to advance our collective interests in an aggressive way. It's all about being a goody-goody and making everything as ethical and transparent as possible.
sure the insurance industry as a whole is wasteful but that isn't really an SOA thing so much as the overall biz culture... actuarial salaries are a drop in the bucket overall
Shoot. I'm disappointed. I had it in my mind that actuaries could basically figure out with a fair bit of precision exactly how likely it would be for person with XYZ demographics and lifestyle to die, get divorced, move, have an accident, commit a crime, declare bankruptcy etc in any given year. I mean, can't they?? That seems like fairly juicy data to me. But I also thought they knew a lot of other more top secret things too. I'm not sure where I got that impression, I think just once when I was speculating on something and an actuary told me "oh I could tell you the exact percentage likelihood that they'll do that within 1, 5, or 10 years" and it made it seem like they had access to all kinds of data that no one else does. So either they were lying or making themselves seem cool, or info that you guys don't think it interesting is more interesting than you think it is. 🙂
But also there are always new and funky insurance products coming out, especially for businesses...some of them seem like they must have something good to look at to determine risk and set premiums.
well the way younger guys in the profession who haven't burnt out yet will typically describe it to girls is "yeah babe basically I can use math to predict when you'll die"... but in practice that just means using a bugman software to credibility weight prescribed SOA tables against company experience data or some shit
more individualized risk factors are typically more the purview of underwriters who'll price you into a premium category based on how fat you are, whether you smoke, sometimes even your credit score etc.
certainly there are ways to be entrepreneurial with an actuarial skillset, but I imagine 99% of the people who could and otherwise would do that just because data scientists at a startup or something. The thing is insurance is one of the most aggressively regulated industries in the country (and even when something's not illegal senior actuaries are huge stuffed shirts) and that kills a lot of fun arbitrage strats in the cradle.
For instance when I was younger I had the idea of marketing life contingent annuities to black people really aggressively with rap videos etc., the idea being melanated mortality rates are MUCH higher than is reflected in any actuarial table (they actually used to separate blackpepo from other races I think but a gay law stopped that) so you can essentially bet they'll die ages before the policy has paid out more than their initial premium, offering a mathematically guaranteed return.
but OF COURSE I soon discovered you could never get away with that for all sorts of reasons and the actuary subreddit was horrified by me even proposing such a thing. That moment is what made me decide the profession is a waste of time; after that I stopped paying attention at work.
Anyway the initial actuarial exams they make you take teach things like probability and financial math that can obv be used for fun stuff... but that material is also fairly accessible to STEM people in general. The really specialized shit that defines fully credentialed actuaries is memorizing literally thousands of pages of incredibly boring regulatory information plus a bunch of specific methodologies for pricing and reserve valuation that literally no person but the worst contemptible bugman you can fathom would ever find interesting, even after taking Walt levels of addy.
But the upshot of this is that anyone who survives in actuarial a very long time is genuinely a very ethical and professional sort of person. You wouldn't want them at your dinner party prob but if you're going to let any credentialing cartel rent seek it might as well be them instead of doctors who are some of the meanest-minded people on the planet.
If you're going to have a big, rent-seeking guild, it's advantageous to appear as ethical as possible in a 1950s 'disinterested professional' sort of way so it doesn't get dismantled.
They don't have the advantage doctors have of looking like the good guys when you're sick. So they have to play nice.
I think the value of this is actually declining as people get more ideologically hostile to the whole 'disinterested professional' idea because of the echoes of white supremacy or something. But it's lasted until now.
We should do a power ranking of the nerdiest and most risk-averse and uptight professions and specialties, too to bottom. I always thought this was accountants, but sounds like actuaries might be worse? Accountants won't make a decision or take a position without making sure someone else (me) has looked over everything and told them it's okay in writing and absolved themselves entirely of responsibility. The one time I dealt with an accountant who actually had a personality and opinions, I was so shocked that I immediately looked up his licensure because I almost didn't believe he was really a CPA lol. Trusts and estates lawyers are the same way. Practically a different species from personal injury lawyers.
Rolling machine setters, operators, and tenders 50.1%
Switchboard operators 49.7%
Extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders 49.6%
Telemarketers 49.2%
Textile knitting and weaving machine operators and tenders 48.9%
Extruding, forming, pressing, and compacting machine setters, operators, and tenders 48.8%
---
Honestly something really poetic about actuary and gaming manager standing atop their respective poles given that insurance and gambling are two sides of the same coin. I am sort of an actuary with the cognitive profile of a gaming manager.
Anyway attorney isn't top 10 for either but legal overall is 35%, which seems right in the middle? But if the behavior of my alky Jewess is anything to go on I'm sure the paralegals are driving that up quite a bit...
There are about 10 hard truths in this piece, even away from the central point about Luigi.
My favorite: “most people feel the need to resolve a stressful conflict right away and can’t handle building up sustained pressure”
Not just chess, this is the bottom line in the two most fundamental areas of human conflict - courting and fighting.
The guy who asks are we a couple yet? is the bitch. And as two fighters close distance, the guy who panics and throws first will be counterpunched out.
I was investment banking to actuary, very similar.
Remote work is the best thing to happen to actuary. Great career minus the sitting in a very boring office for 40 hours. Once remote work solved that problem it was baller, especially if your not some nerd that will fill 40 hours with busywork for everyone.
"This leads us back to the drug use issue. Our culture has gotten downright casual—beyond casual—about psychedelics. Some trust-fund founder in Palo Alto goes off to the jungle, slurps ayahuasca, and returns claiming cosmic epiphanies that, in reality, boil down to “I saw pretty colors and now I think differently about B2B SaaS.” Don’t be shocked if the next big thing is “ayahuasca insurance” for venture capitalists, just in case their prized CEOs come back sounding like deranged street-corner prophets. Psychedelics are not quaint hobbies. They’re chemical sledgehammers to the psyche."
---
It seems likely to me that this dope fried his brain on psychedelics because his back hurt and then fucked up his life. I once knew an actuary that went to Amsterdam and came back in a similar state.
Instances where assassination does any good are pretty far and few between. I wouldn't say they don't exist, I could rattle off a few, but it's rarely a case where like 17% of the economy is concerned. Stuff like that is overdetermined by broad societal factors and individual players are meaningless.
More often it's some overlooked niche case that nobody pays attention to (that guy who killed Shinzo Abe is a good example).
The point about assassinations causing a thermostatic backlash really flips the script on the 'thank God Trump turned his head' meme. If Mangina is just the first of many 'heroes,' could the medium-term outcome look like a law-and-order regime that locks in exactly what Luigi was fighting against? "The most entertaining outcome is the most likely."
Mangione's actions cost you nothing. To use a chess analogy, it would be like a red knight appearing on the board and sweeping away one of your opponents pawns before being removed for cheating. The only way this wouldn't be true is if you consider the CEO/pawn to be on your team, instead of the opponent's.
His actions cost me quite a lot because they make middle class normies more sympathetic to bugmanism and inclined to defend rent seeking corpos.
American politics are aggressively thermostratic and I think like a propagandist, which means I would much rather have people on my own side killed if I had to choose. Every funeral brings a hundred new guys into your camp.
If I got killed or gitmo'd tomorrow then Tortuga would probably 10x overnight.
I get that, and it usually makes sense, but we're past that point. Underlying the idea of creating outrage is the unspoken promise that if one group continues to do violence against another, the injured group will begin to recognize this and do violence in return. The elites have already done violence, the people already recognize this, and we are in the following phase.
Feminized society has lost the ability to punch down down. IQ, heritability and the old time concept of the deserving poor (people who are poor but are not responsible for their situation) are great justifications for punching down. Which is why they are not taught in school and instead all we have is feminized resentment for the upper class.
I guess I’m giving up on my romantic sit-com idea. It was going to be called “Love, Actuarially” and it would’ve starred Breckin Meyer and Zooey Deschanel as two working professionals in Omaha who bonded over their love of the intricacies of the insurance industry.
I like Luigi and I don't agree with Idpol of any kind, but I like the name and purpose of your organization (I'm about to publish a novel about buccaneers with historically accurate weapons and tactics). I want to join, but I'm suspicious of paying the fee, given your contempt for who you call suckers, I'd be pretty dumb to voluntarily give you money. So how about this? Pirate duel, as stated in several surviving Articles, with hangers (cutlasses in the Buccaneer Era) to first blood? I win, I join for free. I lose, I pay the fee and don't join.
I'm absolutely serious. There are "mutual combat" states where this is totally legal. You'll win credibility regardless.
Brian Thompson was a good man. Good for profits, good for business, good for America. He was the best of us. Let us not fall victim to cutting the tallest poppy. He ran a tight ship sure but efficient and laden with premiums too. If you can't handle the reams of repetitive paperwork or court costs as your child lays dying are you really a good provider? Capitalism seems cruel sometimes but it provides a good return on investment.
If you choose to donate to a charity in Brian’s legacy may I suggest The Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation, The Clinton Foundation or the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation. They offer a great $10,000 dinners as well as some influence in future legislation.
God speed Brian and may your destination be both warm and full of old friends
Healthcare has so much government subsidy and third party involvement that the lag of an expanded monetary base becomes absolutely brutal when free money goes away. Other sectors see the new money first with the way things are set up, but the cumulative effect of poor investments will get captured by the services we see as more essential sooner or later. The public is fine with a lot of tough it out or die, but the optics really matter for which ones. And if risk can't be priced in for people with pre-existing conditions, it's disingenuous to think of health insurance an insurance policy at all. Being able to see the situation as it really is and also not be a boy scout about it is so uncommon that success will follow you for doing these things well.
A couple days after this happened, before we knew who Luigi was, an indignant sympathizer was trying to tell me that This Would Change Everything and that Actions Have Consequences. I told her I doubted it could change anything except for who was the man in the CEO's office, but that it did indeed have a consequence: United Health (and many other companies) would now spend even less on their clients because they would be spending more on executive protection; nobody wins except maybe the Pinkertons.
Dick Spence's take on the guy was accurate -- he's a kind of "high IQ midwit" who might be intelligent but lacks the conscience and mental agency to think deeply about anything. What happened with his back/mom sounds tragic but the insurers are not really responsible for that.
There is something kind of based about caring about something enough to assassinate somebody, but it comes across as pathetic and stupid in this instance. There is no evil CEO in the smoke room who is running all this stuff, it is all ZOG + incestives at play here.
He’s not going to be tortured to death but maybe even acquitted of not given a milder sentence depending on what comes out at the trial.
What data sets do actuaries use? Do you have some top-secret databases of info that you use to drive your calculations or something? I think there SHOULD be a show about actuaries, because I feel like they have all kinds of top-secret info that I'd love to get my hands on. They know all kinds of fascinating stats. They have probabilistic and sociological/demographic data that's basically a social scientist's dream. It's too bad they use it for such a boring purpose, because my sense is that they have access to super fascinating info, just no one cares bc they only use it for bean counting and risk calculations. Am I wrong about that? Is this just a fantasy of mine? I've always felt like if I had access to the kind of data actuaries seem to, that I would be able to unlock all secrets of humanity.
the data you are probably thinking of is publicly available:
https://mort.soa.org/
though companies also have proprietary experience data and actuaries will compare that to the mortality table used in pricing to produce an A/E for the CFO etc... but it's genuinely not that interesting most of the time
99% of the job is tweaking Excel models to be compliant with regs and standards of practice. An actuary is closer to a high IQ accountant than a data scientist tbh.
Not all actuarial roles are like that ofc (consulting actuaries are a lot more capable as a rule) and the profession is ostensibly trying really hard to get ahead of predictive analytics / AI so they don't get rekt by data scientists... but it's quite hard because the field is cartoonishly credentialist so a lot of Boomer actuaries are dinosaurs who make like $300k even though haven't learned anything new since the first Bush administration.
A lot of these guys will insist on never even learning SQL, let alone Python, and insist on doing literally everything in Excel / Microsoft Access which simply can't handle big data operations in any sensible way. This in turn slows down reserve valuation and creates bottlenecks in the whole company (and then the other departments are considerably worse!)
As far as Casualty insurers, most states require yearly filings which lay out in detail how rates are determined. These filings are public. It’s not exciting, not interesting even if you’re a person who’s into numbers/data. So if your auto rates go up, you can literally find your companies auto filing and see their justification for your rate increase. It’s generally not that complicated either, and the rigorous exam ladder is essentially a method of gate keeping to keep wages high.
yeah honestly doctors and lawyers would be surprised how terrible we are at leveraging our expertise to create extractive and rent-seeking grifts
I don't know how it feels on the CAS side but the SOA seems a lot more interested in ensuring every actuary acts like Lisa Simpson all the time than doing anything to advance our collective interests in an aggressive way. It's all about being a goody-goody and making everything as ethical and transparent as possible.
sure the insurance industry as a whole is wasteful but that isn't really an SOA thing so much as the overall biz culture... actuarial salaries are a drop in the bucket overall
Shoot. I'm disappointed. I had it in my mind that actuaries could basically figure out with a fair bit of precision exactly how likely it would be for person with XYZ demographics and lifestyle to die, get divorced, move, have an accident, commit a crime, declare bankruptcy etc in any given year. I mean, can't they?? That seems like fairly juicy data to me. But I also thought they knew a lot of other more top secret things too. I'm not sure where I got that impression, I think just once when I was speculating on something and an actuary told me "oh I could tell you the exact percentage likelihood that they'll do that within 1, 5, or 10 years" and it made it seem like they had access to all kinds of data that no one else does. So either they were lying or making themselves seem cool, or info that you guys don't think it interesting is more interesting than you think it is. 🙂
But also there are always new and funky insurance products coming out, especially for businesses...some of them seem like they must have something good to look at to determine risk and set premiums.
well the way younger guys in the profession who haven't burnt out yet will typically describe it to girls is "yeah babe basically I can use math to predict when you'll die"... but in practice that just means using a bugman software to credibility weight prescribed SOA tables against company experience data or some shit
more individualized risk factors are typically more the purview of underwriters who'll price you into a premium category based on how fat you are, whether you smoke, sometimes even your credit score etc.
certainly there are ways to be entrepreneurial with an actuarial skillset, but I imagine 99% of the people who could and otherwise would do that just because data scientists at a startup or something. The thing is insurance is one of the most aggressively regulated industries in the country (and even when something's not illegal senior actuaries are huge stuffed shirts) and that kills a lot of fun arbitrage strats in the cradle.
For instance when I was younger I had the idea of marketing life contingent annuities to black people really aggressively with rap videos etc., the idea being melanated mortality rates are MUCH higher than is reflected in any actuarial table (they actually used to separate blackpepo from other races I think but a gay law stopped that) so you can essentially bet they'll die ages before the policy has paid out more than their initial premium, offering a mathematically guaranteed return.
but OF COURSE I soon discovered you could never get away with that for all sorts of reasons and the actuary subreddit was horrified by me even proposing such a thing. That moment is what made me decide the profession is a waste of time; after that I stopped paying attention at work.
Anyway the initial actuarial exams they make you take teach things like probability and financial math that can obv be used for fun stuff... but that material is also fairly accessible to STEM people in general. The really specialized shit that defines fully credentialed actuaries is memorizing literally thousands of pages of incredibly boring regulatory information plus a bunch of specific methodologies for pricing and reserve valuation that literally no person but the worst contemptible bugman you can fathom would ever find interesting, even after taking Walt levels of addy.
But the upshot of this is that anyone who survives in actuarial a very long time is genuinely a very ethical and professional sort of person. You wouldn't want them at your dinner party prob but if you're going to let any credentialing cartel rent seek it might as well be them instead of doctors who are some of the meanest-minded people on the planet.
If you're going to have a big, rent-seeking guild, it's advantageous to appear as ethical as possible in a 1950s 'disinterested professional' sort of way so it doesn't get dismantled.
They don't have the advantage doctors have of looking like the good guys when you're sick. So they have to play nice.
I think the value of this is actually declining as people get more ideologically hostile to the whole 'disinterested professional' idea because of the echoes of white supremacy or something. But it's lasted until now.
We should do a power ranking of the nerdiest and most risk-averse and uptight professions and specialties, too to bottom. I always thought this was accountants, but sounds like actuaries might be worse? Accountants won't make a decision or take a position without making sure someone else (me) has looked over everything and told them it's okay in writing and absolved themselves entirely of responsibility. The one time I dealt with an accountant who actually had a personality and opinions, I was so shocked that I immediately looked up his licensure because I almost didn't believe he was really a CPA lol. Trusts and estates lawyers are the same way. Practically a different species from personal injury lawyers.
maybe we can use divorce rate as a proxy:
https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/job-divorce-rate-1017
---
Jobs with the lowest divorce rate:
Actuaries 17%
Physical scientists 18.9%
Medical scientists and life scientist 19.6%
Clergy 19.8%
Software developers 20.3%
Physical therapists 20.7%
Optometrists 20.8%
Chemical engineers 21.1%
Religious and education directors 21.3%
Physicians and surgeons 21.8%
---
Jobs with the highest divorce rate:
Gaming managers 52.9%
Bartenders 52.7%
Flight attendants 50.5%
Gaming service workers 50.3%
Rolling machine setters, operators, and tenders 50.1%
Switchboard operators 49.7%
Extruding and drawing machine setters, operators, and tenders 49.6%
Telemarketers 49.2%
Textile knitting and weaving machine operators and tenders 48.9%
Extruding, forming, pressing, and compacting machine setters, operators, and tenders 48.8%
---
Honestly something really poetic about actuary and gaming manager standing atop their respective poles given that insurance and gambling are two sides of the same coin. I am sort of an actuary with the cognitive profile of a gaming manager.
Anyway attorney isn't top 10 for either but legal overall is 35%, which seems right in the middle? But if the behavior of my alky Jewess is anything to go on I'm sure the paralegals are driving that up quite a bit...
There are about 10 hard truths in this piece, even away from the central point about Luigi.
My favorite: “most people feel the need to resolve a stressful conflict right away and can’t handle building up sustained pressure”
Not just chess, this is the bottom line in the two most fundamental areas of human conflict - courting and fighting.
The guy who asks are we a couple yet? is the bitch. And as two fighters close distance, the guy who panics and throws first will be counterpunched out.
Good shit.
Fuck you called me out for how I play chess
I was investment banking to actuary, very similar.
Remote work is the best thing to happen to actuary. Great career minus the sitting in a very boring office for 40 hours. Once remote work solved that problem it was baller, especially if your not some nerd that will fill 40 hours with busywork for everyone.
https://leebressler.substack.com/p/an-unfortunate-murder
"This leads us back to the drug use issue. Our culture has gotten downright casual—beyond casual—about psychedelics. Some trust-fund founder in Palo Alto goes off to the jungle, slurps ayahuasca, and returns claiming cosmic epiphanies that, in reality, boil down to “I saw pretty colors and now I think differently about B2B SaaS.” Don’t be shocked if the next big thing is “ayahuasca insurance” for venture capitalists, just in case their prized CEOs come back sounding like deranged street-corner prophets. Psychedelics are not quaint hobbies. They’re chemical sledgehammers to the psyche."
---
It seems likely to me that this dope fried his brain on psychedelics because his back hurt and then fucked up his life. I once knew an actuary that went to Amsterdam and came back in a similar state.
Instances where assassination does any good are pretty far and few between. I wouldn't say they don't exist, I could rattle off a few, but it's rarely a case where like 17% of the economy is concerned. Stuff like that is overdetermined by broad societal factors and individual players are meaningless.
More often it's some overlooked niche case that nobody pays attention to (that guy who killed Shinzo Abe is a good example).
Was expecting a dumb take, and wasn’t disappointed.
The point about assassinations causing a thermostatic backlash really flips the script on the 'thank God Trump turned his head' meme. If Mangina is just the first of many 'heroes,' could the medium-term outcome look like a law-and-order regime that locks in exactly what Luigi was fighting against? "The most entertaining outcome is the most likely."
Mangione's actions cost you nothing. To use a chess analogy, it would be like a red knight appearing on the board and sweeping away one of your opponents pawns before being removed for cheating. The only way this wouldn't be true is if you consider the CEO/pawn to be on your team, instead of the opponent's.
His actions cost me quite a lot because they make middle class normies more sympathetic to bugmanism and inclined to defend rent seeking corpos.
American politics are aggressively thermostratic and I think like a propagandist, which means I would much rather have people on my own side killed if I had to choose. Every funeral brings a hundred new guys into your camp.
If I got killed or gitmo'd tomorrow then Tortuga would probably 10x overnight.
I get that, and it usually makes sense, but we're past that point. Underlying the idea of creating outrage is the unspoken promise that if one group continues to do violence against another, the injured group will begin to recognize this and do violence in return. The elites have already done violence, the people already recognize this, and we are in the following phase.
Feminized society has lost the ability to punch down down. IQ, heritability and the old time concept of the deserving poor (people who are poor but are not responsible for their situation) are great justifications for punching down. Which is why they are not taught in school and instead all we have is feminized resentment for the upper class.
I guess I’m giving up on my romantic sit-com idea. It was going to be called “Love, Actuarially” and it would’ve starred Breckin Meyer and Zooey Deschanel as two working professionals in Omaha who bonded over their love of the intricacies of the insurance industry.
Hey ! Sounds like I would luv that and could really get into it ! 🥰
---- which is probably not a good sign . 🤷♀️☹️
I like Luigi and I don't agree with Idpol of any kind, but I like the name and purpose of your organization (I'm about to publish a novel about buccaneers with historically accurate weapons and tactics). I want to join, but I'm suspicious of paying the fee, given your contempt for who you call suckers, I'd be pretty dumb to voluntarily give you money. So how about this? Pirate duel, as stated in several surviving Articles, with hangers (cutlasses in the Buccaneer Era) to first blood? I win, I join for free. I lose, I pay the fee and don't join.
I'm absolutely serious. There are "mutual combat" states where this is totally legal. You'll win credibility regardless.
To clarify: by disagreeing with Idpol, that means I disagree with racism of any kind.
Requiem for Brian Thompson, CEO of United
Healthcare
Brian Thompson was a good man. Good for profits, good for business, good for America. He was the best of us. Let us not fall victim to cutting the tallest poppy. He ran a tight ship sure but efficient and laden with premiums too. If you can't handle the reams of repetitive paperwork or court costs as your child lays dying are you really a good provider? Capitalism seems cruel sometimes but it provides a good return on investment.
If you choose to donate to a charity in Brian’s legacy may I suggest The Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation, The Clinton Foundation or the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation. They offer a great $10,000 dinners as well as some influence in future legislation.
God speed Brian and may your destination be both warm and full of old friends
Healthcare has so much government subsidy and third party involvement that the lag of an expanded monetary base becomes absolutely brutal when free money goes away. Other sectors see the new money first with the way things are set up, but the cumulative effect of poor investments will get captured by the services we see as more essential sooner or later. The public is fine with a lot of tough it out or die, but the optics really matter for which ones. And if risk can't be priced in for people with pre-existing conditions, it's disingenuous to think of health insurance an insurance policy at all. Being able to see the situation as it really is and also not be a boy scout about it is so uncommon that success will follow you for doing these things well.
You guys have a full data analyst Boot Camp?
a lightweight self-directed one
A couple days after this happened, before we knew who Luigi was, an indignant sympathizer was trying to tell me that This Would Change Everything and that Actions Have Consequences. I told her I doubted it could change anything except for who was the man in the CEO's office, but that it did indeed have a consequence: United Health (and many other companies) would now spend even less on their clients because they would be spending more on executive protection; nobody wins except maybe the Pinkertons.
I suspect THIS PIECE killed the Luigi cult on Substack.
Which doesn't hurt my feelings , for many of the reasons he gave , except he was more eloquent.
Yesterday it was Luigi is God.
Today it's------ hey , where did he go ?!!!
( at least in my feed ? )
I predicted he would be a T - shirt of the month ,
But this is kinda gratifying.