Late Stage Capitalism

Billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy is a Wall Street speculator accused of pump-and-dump schemes, not a scientist

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23667307

Paywalled, as someone pointed out. Apologies. There is a summary video here on YT

This year, in the ongoing series “Health Care’s Colossus,” STAT documented how UnitedHealth wielded its unrivaled physician empire to boost its profits and expand its influence. The year before, in the “Denied by AI” series, STAT exposed how UnitedHealth used an unregulated algorithm to override clinicians’ judgments and deny health care, highlighting the dangers of AI use in medicine.

They show how UnitedHealth has turned health care into an assembly line that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized. And they chronicle how the $5 trillion American health care system came to be so broken.

These are the folks who discovered their AI algorithm and their reporting brought their fuckery to our collective attention

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24043909

Under this methodology of all 193 UN Member States – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks below Thailand, Cuba, Romania and more that are widely regarded as developing countries.

In 2022, America was 41st. Interesting to see where it will be after this term of office, which looks set to be working against many of these aims.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/28856041

With fast-growing private equity firms controlling as much as 20% of the U.S. economy with minimal disclosure requirements, business leaders must understand the implications of increasing concentration of ownership by both private equity firms and index funds and advocate for enhanced reporting standards, a Harvard Law School professor argues. At stake: market competitiveness, innovation, and economic fairness.

...

Private equity has its origins in leveraged buyouts in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea was to take companies, usually publicly listed on the stock exchange, borrow a lot of money—that’s the leverage—and buy them out. Then, they could use their control to improve the value of the company and resell it, typically 3 to 5 years later. That’s the original idea of what private equity mostly does.

What’s changed since then is that the scale of operations of private equity has grown and grown and grown—to the point that now private equity controls between 15% and 20% of the entire U.S. economy. They’re no longer buying isolated companies and flipping them back to the public markets. Instead, they buy them and sell them to mostly other private equity firms. They’ve become their own separate capital universe.

...

The private equity industry is very good at convincing Congress or regulatory officials to shape laws in a way that allows them to remain essentially dark. They don't put out public reports. They don't put out any information that the public can use to evaluate what they're doing, or even their investment performance.

It is increasingly a challenge for the legitimacy of capitalism. Capitalism depends upon some degree of transparency about how it's functioning, how workers are being treated, and how consumers are being treated.

Its ok. We just need to build more luxury housing units, with tax payer dollars. I'm sure the affordable units will eventually trickle down to us all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24092064

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/29986297

A picture of Luigi from the Super Mario video game franchise, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and flanked by a group of Koopa Troopas.

New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.

archive.org link

cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1081067

In the past, the rhetoric was all about increasing productivity. Now headcount is coming into focus. Companies like OpenAI have begun to openly acknowledge the implications: why recruit more people when there's an AI for that? And do you really need all those employees?

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by The Register. Microsoft did not wish to make a statement on the record. ®

They're not even trying to hide it now

🖕 Fuck PayPal

And fuck Linus Tech Tips for intentionally keeping quiet about this after they found out.

UnitedHealth Group’s stock fell 5 percent on Friday alone, bringing its weekly loss to 10 percent. That wiped roughly $56 billion from the company’s market capitalization.

After-hours trading continued to dip, dropping 5 percent on Sunday after a video leaked UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty, Thompson’s boss, slamming industry critics on social media as “vitriolic” and “not in tune with reality.”

“We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or unnecessary care,” Witty said in a private video to staff filmed in the wake of Thompson’s execution outside of a New York City hotel Wednesday.

The video, published by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein on Friday evening after markets closed, was met with backlash online. “Talk about misreading the situation,” one X user wrote.

UnitedHealth Group’s plunge follows similar trends in health insurance stocks.

Rival firm Elevance Health—the parent of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield—fell six percent by the end of the week.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23329309

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/23668087