👁️ The Spinal Scam Assassin
What Makes a Health Care Radical? Also: AI Fraud Will Feed Itself; MicroStrategy Jenga; Funko Pop AI Harasses Mom; Liberal Media's Dumbest Swindle.
Law enforcement claims to have apprehended the killer of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. Read on to learn more about evidence of the alleged shooter’s horrific victimization by the health care system.
But first, I’ve been concepting some potential cover art for my forthcoming SBF book. Feast your eyes.
Also on the SBF front, I’ve been plowing through recent civil recovery lawsuits filed by the FTX estate, including one against FTX lawboy-in-chief Dan Friedberg. I discovered a juicy detail: it appears FTX/Alameda/Friedberg actually set up a fake consumer electronics website for North Dimension, the entity it used to fraudulently open bank accounts. Image courtesy of CoinTelegraph, who were genuinely on the ball on this one.
Finally, and somewhat bizarrely, I am cited at some length in a new piece about crypto regulation at the American Enterprise Institute. Welcome to any new readers here via those links. Fair warning, this is not tremendously friendly territory - but crypto makes strange bedfellows. We can work it out.
Funko Pop’s Garbage AI Harasses Itch.io’s Mom
A wild story unfolded this week on Twitter, with the admins of indie gaming mecca Itch.Io claiming their site was temporarily knocked offline by “AI powered” Brand Protection Software called Brandshield. Apparently Itch was hosting a minigame with Funko elements and Brandshield generated a “Phishing report” that was sent to Itch’s ISP, resulting in a redirect. That’s bad enough, but after Itch posted the initial complaint, Funko appears to have called an Itch admin’s mother to discuss “accusatory statements on your social media account.”
Class acts all around - dumb AIs making the work of dumb humans easier. And all perfectly on-brand, in fact, since Funko Pops are stupid products for dummies.
AI Scams Are the Point
Edwin Ongweso of The Tech Bubble and This Machine Kills has a new review of the book “AI Snake Oil.” His overarching argument is that, just like Uber before it, AI’s market play isn’t actual innovation, but regulatory capture. This is one motive behind my book: the entire intellectual edifice of Silicon Valley, including Stanford University researchers, have been drafted into the project of tricking the public into believing AI is a miracle.
New Netflix Doc on Bitfinex Hackers Razzlekhan and Dutchie
“Biggest Heist Ever” is a new Netflix doc about the hacking of Bitfinex and the tracing of the crime to crypto’s Bonnie and Clyde. I’m excited because it entertains the angle that the entire arrest was bullshit. That’s a take I’m sympathetic to, because, as some have put it, “Ilya is a fucking idiot.” The doc also features Brett Johnson/Gollumfun, a reformed black-hat and a hell of a character. Check out his YouTube show.
The $MSTR
The Wall Street Journal reports on one signal that MicroStrategy and its Bitcoin-stacking strategy might be a little overextended - the existence of ETFs trying to lever on top of Michael Saylor’s already-leveraged Bitcoin play. But I’m sure everything is fine.
“Improving Crypto UX” is Cope
I’ve often uttered a variation on the idea - I think actually making crypto easier to use is bad because getting over the hump is part of learning how it works. But Ben Basche’s argument is actually a little orthogonal to UX itself, basically that the underlying product-market fit still isn’t there. The piece gives a detailed, nuanced rundown of basically every product category in crypto, so it doubles as a decent deep-dive for relative newbies from an insider perspective. So the essay … has good UX? Ironic.
The Kicker: The Unraveling of Ozy Media
In the annals of financial fraud, getting on a conference call and impersonating a YouTube executive to gas up investors about your amazing videos is pretty remarkably desperate. A new podcast by the Columbia Journalism Review will tell the story of Carlos Watson’s Ozy Media, a boondoggle born of the same neo/liberal mileu as the Clinton and Harris campaigns. Clinton was a notorious headliner of the hilariously bedraggled Ozy Fest, chronicled by Chapo Trap House in 2018, and described by the far superior The Outline as The Ideas Festival for People Who Hate Ideas. With the deeper-than-financial fraud of the contemporary Democratic Party crumbling into dust, there’s no better time to look back at the prefigurative tale of Ozy.
The Grey Man and the Spine Scam
There is an infinite amount already to say about the now allegedly arrested UHC assassin: about the groundwell of fellow-feeling he triggered from sufferers under America’s vicious, dysfunctional healthcare system; about the OSINT toolbox who claimed he’d tracked the shooter via Citibike; about the strange series of surveillance photos seeming to show three entirely different ensembles; about the NYPD’s comically performative search of Central Park; about the strange fact that he kept the murder weapon with him for five days.
But, if the suspect arrested on Monday is indeed the guilty party, the most relevant angle for me is that he was a victim of one of the most horrific scams imaginable. Reporting has already begun to unearth that the twentysomething man received a surgical spinal fusion following a surfing injury.
At around the time of the surgery, he also moved to Japan and cut off contact with his family, and, despite a seemingly privileged background, became increasingly radicalized - including posting a laudatory review of Theodore Kascynski’s manifesto, including the phrase “violence is necessary.”
There have been a lot of statements made over the past five days starting with the phrase “I do not condone violence, but.” It may miss the point, though, to make generalized observations about the country’s mood about health care.
Because a lower spinal fusion in a 20-something man, according to a lot of expert opinion floating around, plausibly borders on criminal behavior - a financial scam, wrapped inside a Cronenbergian mutilation. As a 2003 New York Times showed, fusions are money-makers for hospitals, compared to the physical therapy that often produced similar results. And longer-term, fusions can trigger further degeneration as surrounding tissue and bone compensate for the lack of flexibility in that area.
So yeah, I’ll make the noises: Brian Thompson didn’t “deserve to die.” But his death appears to have been an extremely clear and direct consequence of the corruption that has overtaken his entire industry - and which in turn, more broadly, stands in for the pressure that capitalism puts on us all to serve financial ends, instead of the needs of human beings.
Missed this post somehow. Convertable corolla. I'm not mad at how AI made something unrealistic. I'm mad at how everything can be a Corolla. Corolla's used to mean something. It used to be sedan, hatchback, that's it. It's supposed to be cheap, reliable, and unsexy. Now everything can be a corolla. There's a hybrid corolla SUV for goodness sake. I do not want to see a corolla bulletproof limo with diamond hub caps and hydraulics. But it's coming.