Vince Smith

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

The one subject every one of my favorite podcasts avoids is healthcare.

Sure, they talk about vaccines. They talk about peptides, longevity, and the latest medical device. Cool, bro. A new robot.

I do not care.

I care about the $30,000 disappearing every year before an American family receives a dollar of actual care.

I care about Medicare, insurers, and health systems extracting money from patients, employers, taxpayers, and physicians.

And increasingly, those are not separate institutions.

The insurer owns the physicians.
The health system owns the health plan.
The pharmacy benefit manager owns the pharmacy.

Everyone owns everyone, and the patient owns the bill.

Law makers talk about breaking up the insurance companies while protecting Certifiacte of Need laws in their own backyards and protecting their precious "non-profits".

And I would not care how large these organizations became if they won in an open market.

They did not.

They used government to restrict competition, protect reimbursement, block new entrants, and write rules that favor incumbents.

Then they spent nearly a billion dollars hiring lobbyists to keep it that way.

The lobbyists take their cut.
The lawmakers take the money.
The public elects the lawmakers.

And then people wonder why healthcare keeps getting more expensive.

Healthcare is not ignored because it is boring.

It is ignored because nearly everyone with a microphone is more comfortable discussing the symptoms than naming the people getting rich from the disease.

-Rojas out

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@EricLDaugh Sums it up like a typical commie/Democrat

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@WallStreetApes @BenHarris1690 Who are the Law Firms settings these up?

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@MedicalQuack It's Why the Yankees uniforms have Pinstripes!

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@its_The_Dr Commie's

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

84 years ago today, four Japanese aircraft carriers were burning in the Pacific because of a man who went to work in a smoking jacket and slippers.

Washington took his job, buried his name, and blocked his medal for 44 years.

This is the story of Joseph Rochefort, the codebreaker who saved Midway.

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor burns. Rochefort, head of a Navy codebreaking unit on Oahu, takes it personally. He tells a colleague that an intelligence officer has exactly one job: to tell his commander today what the enemy will do tomorrow. On December 7, he believes he failed at it.

He decides he will never fail at it again.

His unit is Station HYPO, hidden in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor that his men call "the Dungeon." It is cold, damp, and lit like a morgue. Rochefort wears a smoking jacket over his uniform to fight the chill and slippers because the concrete floor wrecks his feet. He works 20 hour days, sleeps on a cot in the basement, and lives on coffee.

His team is just as strange. Brilliant misfit cryptanalysts like Joe Finnegan and Ham Wright, plus the surviving bandsmen of the battleship USS California, sunk on December 7. The musicians turn out to be naturals at running the IBM punch card machines. Sailors who played trombones in November are reconstructing an enemy cipher by March.

Their target: JN-25, the Imperial Japanese Navy's operational code. Tens of thousands of code groups, layered with additives, changed regularly. On a good day HYPO can read maybe 10 to 15 percent of any message. They rebuild the rest from fragments, traffic patterns, callsigns, and Rochefort's freakish memory. He had spent three years in Japan learning the language. He could hold months of intercepts in his head at once.

By May 1942, processing up to 140 decrypts a day, HYPO sees something enormous taking shape. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is massing nearly 200 ships for one decisive battle. The target appears in the intercepts as two letters: AF.

Rochefort is certain AF is Midway Atoll.

Washington is certain he is wrong. The Navy's own codebreaking office, OP-20-G, argues for the South Pacific. Others fear Hawaii again, or even the West Coast. The Army wants planes held back to defend San Francisco. If Nimitz bets his last carriers on Midway and Rochefort is wrong, the Pacific is lost.

So HYPO sets one of the great traps in the history of intelligence.

The idea comes from staffer Jasper Holmes. The order goes to Midway by undersea cable, which the Japanese cannot tap: broadcast by radio, in plain language, that your water distillation plant has broken down.

Midway sends the fake distress call.

Two days later, HYPO decrypts a Japanese intelligence report to fleet commanders: AF is short of fresh water.

Two letters, confirmed. The argument is over.

Now Nimitz goes all in. The carrier Yorktown, mauled in the Coral Sea and given 90 days of repairs, is patched up in 72 hours and sent back out. Three American carriers slip northeast of Midway and wait at a spot on the map they name Point Luck.

On May 27, HYPO cracks the Japanese date and time cipher, the final piece. Nimitz's intelligence officer Edwin Layton, Rochefort's closest friend and partner, gives Nimitz a prediction of nearly insane precision: the Japanese carriers will be spotted on bearing 325 degrees, 175 miles from Midway, around 0600 on June 4.

On the morning of June 4, 1942, a PBY scout plane radios in the sighting. Nimitz turns to Layton and says: well, you were only five minutes, five degrees, and five miles out.

What follows are the most consequential ten minutes of the Pacific war. American dive bombers catch the Japanese carriers with fueled planes and stacked ordnance on their decks. By nightfall, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, four of the six carriers that hit Pearl Harbor, are gone, along with thousands of men and the irreplaceable core of Japan's elite naval aviators. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's advance across the Pacific is broken. It never recovers.

A basement full of misfits had handed the US Navy the greatest ambush in its history.

Then came the knives.

The same Washington officers who had called Midway wrong now claimed the credit. They whispered that Rochefort was difficult, an ex-enlisted man without the right pedigree. Nimitz recommended him for the Distinguished Service Medal. Washington killed it. Nimitz tried again. Killed again.

In October 1942, four months after the victory he made possible, Rochefort was pulled from HYPO. The man who outwitted Yamamoto spent much of the rest of the war commanding a floating dry dock in San Francisco Bay.

He never lobbied for himself, never wrote a self-serving memoir, and rarely spoke of it. He said his real reward came at Midway itself. He died in 1976, unknown to the public, medal denied.

His old shipmates refused to let it go. Layton and others fought the Navy bureaucracy for years with the declassified record. In 1985 the Navy relented, and on May 30, 1986, President Reagan presented the Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort's children in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

44 years late.

One man in slippers, in a basement, out-thought an empire and was punished for being right.

[Dutch Rojas @DutchRojas]

𝐈 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐁𝐮𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐭𝐭.

I hate that Berkshire Hathaway bought UnitedHealth stock.

Because Buffett has spent a lifetime teaching investors to look for businesses with durable moats, pricing power, recurring revenue, and customers who have nowhere else to go.

UnitedHealth checked every box and that ought to terrify every American.

The greatest investor of our lifetime looked at the company sitting between patients and their doctors and saw a wonderful business.

Of course he did.

FYI, UnitedHealth does not cure diseases. It does not perform surgery. It does not comfort patients.

Instead it collects a percentage of the money moving through a healthcare system that becomes more expensive every year.

The sicker the system gets, the larger the opportunity becomes.

Berkshire has already sold the stock.

The lesson remains.

When denying care, controlling data, owning physicians, and raising premiums create the kind of economics Warren Buffett admires, the problem is larger than one insurance company.

The incentives are rotten all the way down.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Well said

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@RapidResponse47 Huff an Puff all you want, I want my tax money back!!!

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@MehekCooke @DAGToddBlanche OHIO, IS FOR SUCKERS!
SHAMEFUL

[Ohio Political News @OHPoliticalNews]

Massive fraud: In 2023 alone, $136 million in cash, weighing 1.5 tons if in $100 bills, was trafficked through Columbus airport from the Somali community to Mogadishu. This money funded Al-Shabaab. Your tax dollars at work. #FraudAlert #TaxDollars

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

A simple question.
https://t.co/YMmAKZHQT6

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@MartiniShark I concur. That DROVE ME CRAZY!
I NEVER WATCHED AN INTERVIEW HE DID BECAUSE HE ALWAYS MADE IT ABOUT HIMSELF.

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@exjon Who is Scott Pelley?

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@BrandiKruse @CBSNews Yeah, he was Obsessed with his glasses

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@JoeConchaTV In short....

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@EricLDaugh He was Awful. All he did was suck in his glasses.

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@GovMikeDeWine @OhioMedicaid Nice try Mike to cover your rear.

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@nickroberts317 Looks like the Project buildings that they demolished.

[Vince Smith @smittyvj]

@DesireeAmerica4 Goverment Overreach