| |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Isn't trading higher profit for +11% more deaths also violence? I have a friend who firmly believes that speed limits higher than 50MPH are violence because they lead to increased deaths. He argues that if we cared about people's lives we would impose a strict 50MPH limit on the roads and even force all cars to top out at 50MPH from the factory. There are millions of tradeoffs in the world where we could reduce deaths, but there's never and endpoint where it's truly done. It's really easy to imagine revenge on PE firms by crushing their profits for a noble cause, but the conversation becomes a lot murkier when the impact starts hitting closer to your own paycheck or lifestyle. | | |
| ▲ | potato3732842 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >I have a friend who firmly believes that speed limits higher than 50MPH are violence because they lead to increased deaths. He argues that if we cared about people's lives we would impose a strict 50MPH limit on the roads and even force all cars to top out at 50MPH from the factory. If you really want to stir shit ask him what we enforce those speed limits with. (hint:violence, but with extra steps) | | |
| ▲ | lkey 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You open your hood to see a 50 mph max speed engine in your vehicle...
You notice that roving speed enforcement is no longer necessary except in school zones, freeing up public resources. You contemplate this new world... Is this... violence? It must be... manufacturing regulations are violence against businesses (people)! You relax a little.
You imagine someone 'woke' being angry at your incisiveness, you are calm. | | |
| ▲ | degamad 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I have an engine with a 50mph speed limiter on it. I open the hood and add a resistor across the input sensor so that it thinks I'm going 20% slower than I really am. I start driving at 60mph. How does society enforce the speed limit regulation against me? (Hint: the threat of, and eventually the use of, violence.) |
|
| |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is what I'm getting at in the sibling comment. Most people make decisions that in the aggregate cost lives. The causal connection and moral weight of taking a life through speeding (or, more likely, by helping create the permission structure for everybody else to speed by speeding yourself) is pretty clear. And I'm saying this as someone who drives at the prevailing rate, rather than the posted limit. None of this is to say that PE firms squeezing vital hospitals aren't morally culpable. Just that there's a meaningful distinction between immoral decisionmaking and violence. | | |
| ▲ | potato3732842 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's the "magic" that underpins all the perverse things modern western societies engage in. Life is considered valuable in integer quantities but fractional life is considered value-less. People are free to do, endorse, concoct and peddle all sorts of things that waste people's time (life) or waste people's money on the basis that it "saves lives" because it prevents lives from being lost in whole numbers but the sum total of the little fractions ad up to more. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I just think we can express the idea that things are very bad without doing violence to the word violence. |
| |
| ▲ | lkey 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Intentionally and artificially reducing the quality or quantity of life-saving resources to the point of excess death is, in fact, violence. I think you wouldn't have trouble recognizing the starvation campaign is Gaza as intentional violence. Thus, I have no trouble asserting that PE firms commit intentional violence against patients. Indirection allows you diffuse the responsibility into the anodyne 'immoral decisionmaking' while social murder remains as it ever was. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Hurtling down the road in excess of the speed limit is also dangerous. Both actions have some probability of killing someone over a long enough time horizon. What's the threshold? Or are most people in cars also essentially murderers as well? | | |
| ▲ | lkey 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | You misunderstand. It isn't 'all the drivers' fractionally at fault (others can quibble about that), it's the people who create the moral hazard. The car industry and politicians that decided that the ungoverned car, the road, and the parking lot will be the only way to traverse Dallas or LA lo those many years ago, the ones that affirm that system with 'one more road' using tax dollars year after year, knowing that more people will die as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... <- the line goes up. They have a duty of care as representatives that they are failing to meet. Compare that to cities in Europe or the North East. When you make policies that serve the few and sacrifice the bodies of the many, that act is violence. Likewise, with PE. When they intentionally understaff a hospital, no single doctor is responsible for killing the patient that died bleeding in the waiting room. It is the choice that we allowed that PE firm to make. Are you comfortable with a fresh MBA using excel to ensure that your local hospital should have four less doctors than strictly necessary to treat you in a timely manner? Society doesn't need to be organized this way, we can and should demand better. Imagine the reverse, a municipality decides to privatize their water and sewage treatment, but puts no restrictions on the results as long at those wealthy enough are not inconvenienced. This is precisely how you get Flint. Or redlined cities that put the 'undesirables' in industrial waste parks. These acts are violence. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | This seems like a worldview calculated so that individuals almost never have any culpability --- even when speeding down the road, the responsibility for that harm is more properly attributed to corporations and politicians. From that vantage point, it's clear to me why one would see the decisions of a hospital-owning PE firm as "violent", while not seeing the decisions of a reckless driver that way. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | NoGravitas 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The term "social murder" has a long pedigree, and is really the term of art for this kind of concealed/indirect "violence". Mark Twain's quote about the two Reigns of Terror also applies, and is perhaps a little older. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, and if you go from the actual definition of social murder, basically everybody in the G8 is a murderer, unless you artificially confine the analysis to your own county. I'm sure the concept has a lot of utility philosophically, but when you try to distill it down to "PE firm owners are murderers" you wind up in pretty crazy places unless you supply a lot of motivated reasoning and special pleading. | | |
| ▲ | array_key_first a day ago | parent [-] | | There's infinite levels of badness and eventually it does reach a point, be it in risk, probability, magnitude, or impact, in which it is super bad, and we may consider it violence, or murder, or crimes against humanity, or what have you. Everything is not everything else. Scale not only matters, it's almost the only thing that matters. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent [-] | | If you can define that threshold, you don't need terms like "social murder" anymore. | | |
| ▲ | array_key_first 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nobody can really because it's complicated. Or, at least, nobody can agree, which is why we have the terms. However, I think the terms have some validity, because the broader concept does. I mean, is Hitler a murderer? Is your run of the mill burglary gone wrong worse than the Holocaust? Obviously not. So there has to be some kind of understanding of organized death. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not sure "at least it wasn't the Holocaust" is, in practice, quite the defense legal argument it's being made out to be here. |
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | rybosome 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I see your point, but I’m not sure that I agree. Consider that when speeding, you might cause an accident. Such an accident would most likely impact a small number of people other than yourself. When a PE firm engages in extractive hospital management, it provably increases mortality rate, and it does so at scale. The first choice carries possible risks of lower magnitude, the second choice carries guaranteed risk of higher magnitude. “Risky behavior” vs “ruthless greed”, the latter feels much closer to violence. |
| |
| ▲ | NekkoDroid 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I recently saw an article which was talking about a study thatc concluded that if the Autobahn here in Germany had a speedlimit of 120 Kph we would save a grand total of roughtly 58 lives per year. German article: https://www.spiegel.de/auto/tempolimit-120-koennte-58-mensch... | |
| ▲ | lkey 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "we could reduce deaths, but there's never and endpoint where it's truly done" What a wonderful argument for never trying to improve the world you also reside in. "your own paycheck or lifestyle." If excess mortality is required for your lifestyle, change how you live. Do you deny insurance claims for fun? Are you the human avatar of GE and Raytheon? Do you need to manufacture child-vaporizing bombs to maintain your 'lifestyle'? Genuinely, what is wrong with you? PE firms are not people to take vengeance on. They are not necessary, if they vanished from the Earth tomorrow, the 'worst' outcome is the wealthy owners and workers would need to find new, less violent, employment. | |
| ▲ | Muromec 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In residential area it is at the very least negligence on the part of authorities who set the limit | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The claim was that 50mph should be the highest limit anywhere, including freeways. Combined with a hard 50mph limit imposed on vehicles. You buy a new car, it can't go faster than 50mph, period. The movement has roots in Ralph Nader going back to the 50s https://nader.org/1970/12/11/the-american-automobile-designe... | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That's a little bit out there if taken out of context. On my street the limit is 15 KM/h, on most city roads it's 30 (again, KM/h, not MPH), but on the actual highways where only cars are present and where you don't necessarily need to be, the limit is over a 100. Now I can probably understand how one can take such radical position, when living in a place that doesn't restrict cars as much as they are restricted here. It's like being so much disillusioned with US that USSR propaganda starts to be appealing and belieaveble. I guess? | | |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To the extent it is, people are universally guilty of it, unless you can find a clear bright line for which selfish(/rational) decisions are violent and which aren't. Is it some number of hops from the person who dies that makes the difference? | | |
| ▲ | overfeed 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > To the extent it is, people are universally guilty of it, unless you can find a clear bright line for which selfish(/rational) We all ingest some level of arsenic, and are "universally" exposed to radioactivity, but just because something is falls on a continuous spectrum, doesn't mean all levels are equal, there is a point where it becomes too much. That point will not be the same for everyone, but it exists. > Is it some number of hops from the person who dies that makes the difference? Not according to the Nuremberg trials. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, so if that's something you believe, regarding Nuremberg, then you're basically acknowledging my point. | | |
| ▲ | overfeed a day ago | parent [-] | | No, because you're insinuating that since we're all responsible for some micromorts[1], somehow our culpability is the same as those who are some responsible for hundreds or thousands of morts[0], which is equating across 10 orders of magnitude in risk to human lives. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort 2. Is that what you call 10^6 micromorts? | | |
| ▲ | tptacek a day ago | parent [-] | | That's not actually what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that we make specific choices that have material mortality costs to the world, not that simply by taking up space in our living room we're responsible for some number of nanomorts or whatever. Speeding on the road isn't the most important of those choices, but it's usefully easy to reason about, so start there. If you want to get closer to the culpability that a PE firm has, think about all the ways in which we deliberately benefit from global inequality. All of this can be (is!) bad. But it's not violence in any meaningful sense of the term. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | SpaceNoodled 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's a clear chain of responsibility. | | | |
| ▲ | keybored 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | We are all guilty of living in our own society? No, some people are hundreds of times more responsible. | | |
| ▲ | potato3732842 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I wonder why your opinion is so unpopular around here. Surely the hapless landscaper is substantially less responsible for any violence, death, etc, etc, he benefits from than say a lobbyist who gets paid to get the laws to favor his employer. We don't need to figure out an exact formula in order to be able to conclude some parties leverage violence far more than others. |
|
| |
| ▲ | MSFT_Edging 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the replies splitting hairs on what is violence and what isn't is missing the point. This is a hospital. A building designed for differentiating life and death and(hopefully) attempting to steer towards the former. This isn't a speed limit or some other market where there's no ethical consumption. One doesn't choose going to a hospital. It's a place you go when you are at metaphorical gunpoint. | |
| ▲ | bcrosby95 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wouldn't call it violence, but I think it's A Problem when companies have two viable policies, and they choose the one that is known by them to statistically cause more deaths. On top of that, people will give them social cover for making this decision. Because, y'know, its just capitalism/business or whatever. It's not like they murdered someone, they just told their worker bees to do something they knew would kill more people than they had to. | |
| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, only direct fist-on-face contact is violence. Indirect violence doesn't exist. |
|
