I’m choosing to read that as someone is screwing with him.

I feel like you can track this some in early TV shows. Way back when, you had shows like I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver, featuring loving, largely functional families. Once this became an expected trope, shows like The Honeymooners and The Flintstones subverted that expectation, but became such a hit that they became the formula to emulate - so it became common to joke about marital strife.

Sometimes you’d get a show like The Addams Family, that would again subvert this new expectation; but they didn’t start becoming the norm until much more recently.

I think you can play complex characters that are tied in to the world just fine with newbies. I have no idea how to manage my footing when I swing a sword, but many of my characters do! Similarly, my quick-fingered thief likely knows a great deal about the ghost field that I’ve yet to learn (I think this is what you meant? The only ghost fence I’m seeing is from Morrowind).

The way I’ve handled this is to give a quick, concise rundown about a topic right when it becomes relevant, or looks about to become relevant. I keep it limited to just what they need to know for what’s happening now, and only expand on it if asked. Being relevant to what they’re doing right now makes it easy to focus on, and being able to experiment with it right then helps it stick for them.

If it’s something just one or two people should know (like how their automatons function, or the political situation of their distant cousin’s family that they’re walking into), I’ll try to give the information just to that player . And if they improvise or expand on what I said, I do whatever I can to make what they said true - that kind of player buy-in is absolute gold, no matter how it might diverge from what I had in mind!

The idea is to teach complex game elements in play as much as possible, rather than explain them. They’ll remember the intricacies of court a lot better if they discover them while being cats-paws, or running a heist! (This is also how I introduce GURPS to people - start with the simple rules, and if they want to try something different, we’ll walk through how that part works. If they didn’t like how that worked, we try a different way next time - either different rules for it, or a different approach).

Because the US could do a whole lot more?

It’s a popular look!

My point is that he was more than just a cog. He may not have been the sole villain and mastermind, but he was more than just a cog - he was a driver.

He could have done a number of other things. He wasn’t just a cog, he actively drove many of the problems with the health insurance industry today, as the person in control of the most egregious offender.

I’m sure he’ll be replaced with someone similar, and I’m sure he had plenty of encouragement; but that doesn’t make him any less culpable.

I’ve lived in Kansas City for about 15 years, and I’ve seen a gun get pulled on someone once. SUV almost clipped a motorcyclist while making a left turn into the lane a little ways in front of us. Motorcyclist did a quick u-turn, caught up to the SUV, and pulled a gun on the driver. The driver quickly and frantically apologized, the biker shook his head and reholstered his gun, and got back on his bike and both drove off in different directions.

I started slowing down to increase distance when I saw the motorcycle do its initial u-turn, but I was pretty much trapped in the lane. I had my whole family in the car with me - I’d have been willing to testify after, but no way I’d be willing to put them all at risk to intervene. I was looking for ways to get us to safety, and was pretty much down to popping us up on the sidewalk to get around and get away if things got bad (it was rush hour, there was no room in the other lanes for us).

What I see of the drivers in the video is a) It’s early morning, and they’re paying just enough attention not to hit each other in a rush hour crawl; and b) they’re trapped by everyone else in the rush hour crawl. Not getting shot at this point (because you can’t tell he’s just targeting a CEO) means not getting noticed, because you don’t have good options for getting away.

It kinda sounds like he did this with at least the bones of a plan. And aren’t silencers relatively easy to improvise, if you don’t need it to last?

Died, disabled, or went through other unnecessary, avoidable pain and suffering. It’s… quite a pool of candidates.

It sounds like he was receiving regular death threats and considered it par for the course.

If the CEO disagrees with the directions of the board, the CEO has a number of options. They can easily be considered culpable.

Per NPR, an annual investor’s conference for their parent company was scheduled to start this morning - https://www.npr.org/2024/12/04/nx-s1-5215881/brian-thompson-unitedhealthcare-ceo-shot-new-york

I mean, Bernie Sanders is right there…

I can be mad at both.

Democrats could have tried to improve the lot of the working classes.

People could have voted not to throw their neighbors to the wolves.

I’m not confident the nurse was wrong!

better for Dems if he doesn’t drop out of the race

Need to be careful with this kind of thinking - that was the Dems’ attitude towards Trump during the 2016 election.

GURPS has a specific disadvantage that is essentially this.

That was my first thought!

Oh yeah: https://instinctmagazine.com/white-nationalist-gavin-mcinnes-plugs-himself-to-own-the-libs/

There’s probably better sources, that’s just the first Google result.

That is such a frustrating storyline… Why couldn’t they just slap a suppression collar on him? Or see if there’s a material that might block his power, and make him a suit out of that? Or get him a LMD and let him live virtually through that while he stays safely stashed somewhere? Why do they go straight to “kill him, he’s bad PR for us!!!”