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If a city has a fentanyl epidemic, is it best to do nothing and let it run through the junkies ? Gate them to a neighborhood, soft limiting how many new junkies can join them. But don't fix it.
Set up a 'clean up insurance' job with a wholly owned subsidiary 3rd party. Instantly high prestige.
Something like "Health insurance companies spend too much money on goodies making your healthcare expensive. Healthcare Janitor comes in to eliminate wasteage and make insurance cheaper." Really it's like any capital efficiency, accounting, analytics job. Hire STEM grads to keep the activists out. Markets are happy cause it saves company money, people are happy because Insurance seems to have a watchdog, employees are happy because they are supposedly reigning in the greedy insurers.
Separately, this assassination sets a terrible precedent. Logistically, Assassinations are easy. In NYC,USA where crowded streets, guns & hoodies are common, you may even escape. If a felon is going to recidivate, then might as well go big. Grand conspiracies are hard to keep under wraps. But, one off killings have perfect secrecy by definition. In imperfect conditions, the Homicide clearance rate is 50%. With a perfect disguise, you'd have much better odds.
The only reason we don't see more assassinations is because "we live in a society." American society has broken down before (Inner city gang violence), but it localized to intra-ghetto squabbles. A (resigned) cultural acceptance for freak assassinations may develop. Then the pandoras box is open. I bet freak assassinations follow a similar social virality pattern as suicides. Similar to suicides, once it becomes a cultural meme, it's hard to take it below a certain base rate.
This is the classic argument against Narcan, sure.
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How do we prevent this from succumbing to the same thing that caused insurers to become the hated avatars of bloat and inefficiency?
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I do find it surprising assassinations aren’t more common given Americas high suicide rate. If you already feel like checking out of life, why aren’t you doing other reckless stuff beforehand? Of course there are mass shootings, but those seem so pointless and nihilistic.
Because you're incapable of doing those things, by that condition's definition.
Mass shootings are not generally perpetrated by those kinds of people- the vast majority of them are targeted, and the death [functionally, execution] of the criminal is simply priced in as their cost of doing that violence.
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The other poster nailed it, most people who are suicidal have severe depression which will involve low levels of motivation, planning, concentration, and energy.
Some people with other forms of mental illness can end up violent and suicidal but those generally involve significant disorganization (medical impairment, substance abuse, psychosis, and mania).
Most people who are personality disordered and like this are also disorganized and shitty at planning (as in severe borderline personality disorder). Anti-socials and narcissists are better at forethought (ish) but typically mostly care about themselves and don't usually see the benefit of making this kind of statement.
So you need something weird like malignant narcissism, a relevant delusional disorder, and so on.
Mentally healthy and well people with other motivation (such as a person with terminal illness who is handling it well but knows they will pass away soon) are much more able to complete this type of action but don't do so because...healthy and well.
You need the perfect storm of ability, interest, and organization.
Most with those three find better ways to spend their time but politicization may change that.
we still get mass shootings by depressed people, just not assassinations. Is it just that mass shootings are easier?
Not all subjective depression and depression symptoms come from major depressive disorder. People with psychosis are also depressed, as are those with borderline personality disorder (well-ish, that's more complicated).
I've read some papers identifying the mass shooting type as typical narcissists (specifically malignant narcissist), which may be superficially depressed but it manifests in a very different way.
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If you're suicidal, you're most likely in a deep, deep depression. Depressed people don't exactly have high motivation or impetus to do stuff, and assassinations - even if you're not planning to survive it - take planning and effort. Tracking down one random person (who presumably, because of their high-profile statute, puts effort into maintaining their personal privacy and security) and actually getting to them with a lethal weapon of some type seems like an awful lot of work.
But we still get mass shootings by depressed people, just not assassinations.
Mass shootings are easier, as horrible and macabre as it is to say it. Soft institutional targets that don't move and don't have to be tracked down.
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Moreover, it seems the technology for carrying out assassinations without being caught has improved by leaps and bounds since, say, the heyday of Weather Underground in the 1960s and ‘70s; 3D printed ghost guns and improvements in robotics and computer vision, not to mention the Internet, mean that it’s possible to set up an untraceable, remote-controlled, perhaps even autonomous killbot to assassinate someone without even being physically present at the time. Yes, CCTV and vastly higher amounts of SIGINT from ubiquitous smartphones do make catching criminals easier. But I still think the balance favors the would-be assassin; if the killbot can be assembled days or weeks in advance, in, say, an abandoned warehouse overlooking a parade where the victim will be marching, good luck finding the assassin.
Uh, this is all theoretical of course.
Anyhow, I chalk it up to us being an older, fatter, richer, and more docile society than we were during the Days of Rage.
Without being an expert, I would be dubious about assassinating someone with a killbot. Even if you make it self-destructing, it would be so easy to accidentally contaminate it - to leave some data from when you flashed it, or for your activation signal to be registered on the wifi / phone / satellite network you use. It may well be possible, but you would need institutional knowledge like Mossad probably has to reliably pull it off.
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