The piece mentions Thompsons humble rural upbring quoting another NYT article. He somehow fails to cite this.

But during Mr. Thompson’s tenure, UnitedHealthcare and its parent company were accused by lawmakers and regulators of systematically rejecting health claims.

UnitedHealth Group was the subject of a blistering report by a Senate panel this year that documented insurers’ refusal to pay for the care of older people recovering from falls or strokes. Mr. Thompson’s company was cited for a surge in denial rates of post-acute care for people on private Medicare Advantage plans, which increased to 22.7 percent in 2022 from 10.9 percent in 2020.

Earlier this year, Mr. Thompson and two other UnitedHealth Group executives were accused of insider trading and fraud in a lawsuit filed by the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund.

The lawsuit claimed Mr. Thompson sold $15 million in personally held company stock while the Justice Department was starting an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth Group, an inquiry that he and other executives had failed to disclose. When news of the investigation became public, the price of the company’s stock plunged, erasing nearly $25 billion in shareholder value, according to the lawsuit. On Tuesday, officials from UnitedHealth Group declined to comment on the matter.

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I could see someone posting a screen grab where another used a slur and censoring it accordingly.

Agreed. I was thinking more on it and realized the same when reading another comment.

Are the n-word and r-word swears? I’m all for censoring those.

Meme is truth.

The rules are complicated, as they stipulate tipsters in with a chance of the FBI portion of the reward cannot nominate themselves.

This means the McDonald’s worker will have to be put forward by an investigating agency, such as the Department of Defense or the FBI, which is then reviewed by an interagency committee.

If approved, the suggestion is passed on to the Secretary of State, who signs off on the final decision.

If that’s not tough enough, the full reward amount could also be in dispute as payment amounts are based on factors from the value of the information provided, the level of threat, the severity of danger or injury to people or property, and the degree of the source’s cooperation.

As for the NYPD’s $10k, the rewards program is granted through Crime Stoppers, where tipsters receive a unique reference number.

This number is crucial as the tipster has to use it call back or check the status of the investigation online before lodging a claim with the NYC Police Foundation and the Crime Stoppers Board of Directors, who ultimately decide whether to approve the tip and instruct the caller how to receive it.

So, if the informant called 911 instead of Crime Stoppers, they might be unable to make the claim.

In both cases, the rewards will only be paid out if the arrest leads to indictment or conviction from the court - so the McDonald’s employee could be waiting a while and even at the end of it all, might not even get a dime.

Doing god’s work over here

This is probably a weird cropping, but I like to think this doors pushed open since there are no hinges on this side.

I think as the capital owning class is the ruling class, then it’s capitalism even if everyone pays an equivalent share to the state. I think the crux of the issue is if there is a group of people who can meet their living needs without having to sell their labor.

The US embassy has been shuttered since 2012 when Syria severed relations. Limited services are provided out of the Czech embassy for the US.

The roots of the relationship goes back several decades.

By the late 1970s, the state apparatus of the Baath regime under Assad had consolidated into an anti-Sunni orientation. Official propaganda incited Alawite farmers against rich Sunni landowners and regularly disseminated stereotypes of Sunni merchants and industrialists, casting them as enemies of nationalisation and socialist revolution. Bitterness towards the Assadist regime and the Alawite elite in the Baath and armed forces became widespread amongst the Sunni majority, laying the beginnings of an Islamic resistance. Prominent leaders of Muslim Brotherhood like Issam al-Attar were imprisoned and exiled. A coalition of the traditional Syrian Sunni ulema, Muslim Brotherhood revolutionaries and Islamist activists formed the Syrian Islamic Front in 1980 with objective of overthrowing Assad through Jihad and establishing an Islamic state. In the same year, Hafez officially supported Iran in its war with Iraq and controversially began importing Iranian fighters and terror groups into Lebanon and Syria. This led to rising social tensions within the country which eventually became a full-fledged rebellion in 1982; led by the Islamic Front. The regime responded by slaughtering the Sunni inhabitants in Hama and Aleppo and bombarding numerous mosques, killing around 20,000–40,000 civilians. The uprising was brutally crushed and Assad regarded the Muslim Brethren as demolished.

You’d expect party unity between Syrian Ba’ath and Iraqi Ba’ath, but Saadam was labeled a fascist and the Syrian regional branch recognized Khomeni rather early on. Survival and having regional friends were more important than playing games.

I figured I’d dig a bit and find the source. It’s from a 2006 NYT article. Here’s the quote in context:

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

This quote is nominally about the ruling class manipulating the state for their own benefits. However, I don’t think he would do away with class as a Marxist revolution would. Rather, he thinks class warfare would end when the rich are taxed a proportion equal to the working class. The state would still exist in service of the bourgeois, ownership of the means of production would still be theirs, and society would still be shaped by them.

It boggles my mind how you manage to dance around every request for science backed evidence focusing only on your preconceived notions. When you weirdly in the most internet way say I won’t read the scientific article cited in the conservative think tank whose only purpose is to skewer housing first and misrepresent it’s working. I read it and note that that they misuse the findings of the journal. Silence.

I ask for scientific studies to support your view. There is now several decades of systematic research to support it’s role in addressing the homelessness crisis. Why? Is it just because you don’t want to read a view that may complicate your prescription? Do you not feel comfortable reading scientific articles? What is going on?

Your definition never mentions the role of case worker in developing goals and creating buy in for compliance. Patience, even highly motivated ones, regularly lapse in compliance. Life changing transformations are not easy.

I provided a quote that we don’t have understanding why people get clean. It’s not because we force them, that’s for sure.

Why do you now bring up 110? Does this have anything to do with Housing First? Or is it part of so opus that addicts are bad children who need to be forced to do what’s good for them?

I don’t think we’re going to meet in a space of mutual understanding. I think your presumptions that there people get clean only if you force them. You just keep on shouting at me that this is true. Show me some evidence because everything I see from scientific studies to front line workers say, “On occasion or happens, but the harm it does to others is far worse.”

You seem to not know what Housing First is. From the 2007 HUD report “The Applicability of Housing First Models to Homeless Persons with Serious Mental Illness”

And you also have a single image that people get better only through resident treatment. As the paragraph before that states, it’s not well understood:

Do you think there’s no professional managing the case? That they just give them keys, a pat on the back, and proclaim “Figure it out!” It’s naive to think either solution is a magic bullet, but one approach has statistically better outcomes.

Man… The amount of comments saying that kids are dumb at fifteen and I didn’t know what I was doing at fifteen are all falsely equating respect with success and knowledge. Kids literally don’t know what their doing because they are figuring it out. They’re not dumb, they have a lot to learn. And most want to.

Kids need respect for being who they are. You give most kids real respect and watch them do everything they can to live up to it. They need real connection and mentors. When you give high support then you can set high expectations.

I was joking because the previous commentator made reference to the end of the book called an appendix. And I was calling that vestigial. Calling the end of the book vestigial was kind of funny to me because it’s obviously not true and doubly so because the appendix organ doesn’t appear to be so.

All of which is to say, apologies for making you suffering my sense of humours.

It’s vestigial.