this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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Showerthoughts
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The system already chooses leaders based on their willingness to do violence to others, so I don't see any downside if they decide to start sacrificing their safety and wellbeing.
That's not strictly necessary, as long as there's a general trend of risk increasing along with harm done.
It's not that it's necessarily a downside (though it probably is because people like that are potentially even worse to be ruled by), but you said there's a mechanism for coercion by assassination to work here. This is why there won't be; you will just get harder corpos.
It's necessary because what if the risk factor is simply working in that industry at all, because of all the people fucked over by it? If regardless of their actual efforts to improve the humanitarian situation, executives are judged shallowly, there is no incentive to do anything except to quit and be replaced by someone who has more of a gangsterish disposition.
You're postulating one possible (and in my mind, unlikely) outcome. I'm pointing out that the usual and straightforward result of threatening punishment is that people stop doing the activity (or at least rethink it).
It's 2024. Stats and numbers are publicly available and easily searchable on the internet. UHC had double the industry average rejection rate. And the CEO had been in charge for long enough that if he had wanted to make changes, he could have. There's no 'hypothetical' scenario here.
It's weird how only in the US is it necessary for insurance companies to fuck their customers over to survive. I wonder why insurance companies in the rest of the world can survive without fucking their customers over? I suppose it's a puzzle we'll never solve.
The idea that punishment works is for the most part an authoritarian fantasy, not reality, and this is backed by both research into individual behavior and collective behavior.
Probably because the insurance companies they compete with are bound by the same (specific, predictable, law-based) rules prohibiting that behavior. Probably not because they are afraid of angry customers with guns.
The idea that punishment works is the concept behind our entire justice system, and most of society.
You seem to have missed the point. You claimed that 'the risk factor is simply working in that industry at all'. I'm pointing out that the industry does not inherently have any risk factor, and it's entirely possible to be in the industry without murdering tens of thousands of people. The rest of the world manages to do it. The risk factor would be deciding to screw your customers over.
It's one of the concepts, and that's a big part of why we have so much evidence against it.
On a quick google:
So the more executions, the more effective it is?
Sounds right, but again with the caveat, what are they being caught for? Being a healthcare executive at all? Some vaguely defined moral threshhold? What is it they are being taught to fear, and how disconnected is that from any actual intention? Like beating a dog to try to get it to stop destroying your furniture. And then consider that certain punishment for them isn't actually realistic unless it's the government imposing it. Vigilantes can't get them all or probably even many of them.
If anything, China and Russia have shown that having unclear laws and lines are far more effective than clear-cut rules, because when you don't know where the line is, you self-police to a degree more than the state would otherwise do. It doesn't work on dogs because they aren't intelligent enough to understand. It DOES work on humans because we get it.
That would depend on how popular a movement it becomes, hmm? It certainly worked for the IRA.