Brian Thompson, Not Luigi Mangione, Is the Real Working-Class Hero One of the more moving stories in The Times this week is an account of the life of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive who was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside of a Midtown Manhattan hotel. Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa,” a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño report. “His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain.” Thompson’s childhood was spent “going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms.” Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed. One ex-Times reporter, Taylor Lorenz, said she felt “joy” at the killing. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, offered that “violence is never the answer” but “people can only be pushed so far.” Pictures of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of Thompson, have also elicited a fair amount of oohing and ahhing on social media over his toned physique and bright smile. But if Mangione’s personal story (at least what we know of it so far) is supposed to serve as some sort of parable, it isn’t one that progressives should take comfort in. He is the scion of a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, was educated at an elite private school and the University of Pennsylvania and worked remotely from a nice apartment in Hawaii. And while Mangione, like millions of people, apparently suffered from debilitating back pain, excellent health care is not generally an issue for Americans of great wealth. All this suggests that Mangione may prove to be a figure out of a Dostoyevsky novel — Raskolnikov with a silver spoon. It’s a familiar type. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was a lawyer’s son whose mother moved him to London before he went on to become an international terrorist. Osama bin Laden came from immense wealth. Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies can cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion. As for the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss America’s supposed rage at private health insurers, it’s worth pointing out that a 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.” Even a majority of those who say their health is “fair” or “poor” still broadly like their health insurance. No industry is perfect — nor is any health care model — and insurance companies make terrible calls all the time in the interest of cost savings. But the idea that those companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers. Thompson’s life may have been cut brutally short, but it will remain a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life without the benefit of rich parents and an Ivy League degree. As for the killer, John Fetterman had the choicest words: He’s “going to die in prison,” the peerless Pennsylvania senator told HuffPost. “Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.”

Is this the second cumming?

https://bsky.app/profile/kelpiesi.bsky.social/post/3lckifzfxuk2m

If you read this comment I totally misread yours, pls ignore :3

just knew they have the right man no doubt in their minds

As a crim minor, this is the start to every documentary they show you about coerced confessions that have been discovered as false

Good, sometimes idiots need separated from their money. If you bought in to “hawk coin” thinking you were gonna make a quick buck and lost your ass, you played the market and lost. Rub some dirt in it.

Watched one of my friends put beer in his cereal on vacation because we didn’t have milk. Apparently it was good

DIA hopefully DOA

I had to do some configuration with pulse audio on fedora to get these at 24 bit, otherwise they’ll work out of the box. I haven’t tried running their app in wine or anything, but it works as an audio device out of the box

It’d be absolutely terrible if the form got spammed with garbage

This is kinda cursed, but I use Snapchat if it’s something quick and dirty (and quality doesn’t matter)

Through your pants no less!

Been avoiding nzxt for years after I bought an H1 and it was a heaping pile of shit. PSU, AIO, and the included riser all failed within about a year of use. They sent my a replacement AIO with no fans and no mounting hardware (I missed that the bracket was still on, they did warn to take any accessories off but the fan was zip tied from the factory). Same with the PSU which they sent with no cables, which was visibly a different model than what I had cables for before, after arguing for a month to try and get them to send me anything. Didn’t even bother with the riser, moved to a different case and just advised my friends against buying from them

Instead of tying “STOP”, you can now press a button!

This will basically end spam /s

AI could never create this

Correct me if I’m wrong, but exclusivity clauses seem kinda redundant for Corning. Gorilla glass is top of the chain; but I guess it (would’ve) protected future products from eating their lunch

My first car was a 1991 VW Fox. For it’s age it held up well, never leaked oil, but definitely had a decent set of issues. My favorites were loosing the linkage on my way to a breakfast date, and blowing my coolant hose up as I was arriving at the local sledding hill. Luckily there was a house next to the hill and the guy saw the smoke coming from under the hood and got us some duct tape to piece it together to get home, and I had water bottles in the back. Still my all time favorite car but I couldn’t get it to pass inspection because of the frame damage from the rust belt.

Briefly had a 2008 Subaru Impreza, but that’s my dads car now. Previous owner jumped it backwards and blew the TCU and destroyed the transmission. We swapped those out, which was the easiest swap I’ve ever done on a car; bar from dropping the transmission from the jack onto my hand. Last I heard my dad recently replaced the shocks on it.

My current car is a 2010 Jetta that has a massive oil leak, I just keep it topped up and 5 quarts of oil in my trunk, gotta be damage to the filter housing and I have a new one but I’ve put off doing it for like a year now. I also blew a tranny about a year after owning it, then I also lost the transmission in the car ;) (My dad hates this joke lol) The previous owners took it to AAMCO and the gear oil had been grossly underfilled. Swapped that out and it’s been running great since. In hindsight I should’ve done the filter housing at the same time as the transmission but I still thought it might’ve been the vacuum pump seal and replaced the gasket on that before learning it wasn’t. It was leaking a bit anyway so I’m glad I did.

Honestly it probably just runs the underlying git command

Flipping through the reviews, looks like they learned nothing from FS2020. Everyone still stuck in download simulator. If you’ve purchased this and gone over the 2 hour mark steam support is usually really quite lenient. I had about 10 hours in menu for FS2020 when I finally called it.