I keep hearing all these excuses from the insurance industry, usually parroted back to the consumer by reporters. But I have a hard time believing them.
Very anecdotal, but I haven’t noticed a tangible increase in bad driving. It’s about where it has been for the past 10-20 years. And new cars have more and more safety features built in more. I’m just not seeing anything to warrant the insurance increases - certainly not too the degree so many are facing.
Then there’s the excuse about government legislation being the cause. I don’t buy that either. Florida has bent over backwards to placate the insurance industry, and the only thing Floridians have got in return is having their wallets totally fucked.
The sniff test doesn’t just suggest that the underlying major reason is corporate greed, it reeks of it.
Corporate greed of the insurance companies plays a part, but it is complicated. There is also the skyrocketing size and price of cars driven by auto manufacturer greed (big luxury SUVs and trucks are way more profitable so they’ve mostly quit making small cars) paired with decades of transportation network design that is hostile toward facilitating any mode of transportation outside of autos and also drives preference for larger vehicles.
Our car-first transportation system encourages a snowball effect where having huge cars all around you incentivizes you to upgrade to a larger car because you have no visibility in a small car once half the other drivers have big ones. Additionally, walking and biking become less safe because the cars’ blind spots get huge and you can’t make eye contact to tell if half the drivers see you when you walk/bike through your neighborhood. You also can’t see around large vehicles at intersections to tell if a crossing has anyone else approaching, so you might as well hop in a car instead of trying to get around via cheaper transportation modes. Tearing a hole in your pants by tripping over a dog while walking is cheaper to patch or replace than damage to a car from swerving your vehicle into a pole while attempting not to run over the dog in your path. People are more likely to end up in the latter circumstance when there are no safe foot or bike paths to get around their neighborhood, so that factors into the cost of insurance.
You shouldn’t need a two (or more) ton personal vehicle to safely take care of small local errands, but our cities are designed where that is the safest option. The more weight something has, the more momentum it has at a given speed, requiring a longer stopping distance, reducing your ability to react to hazards in time, and increasing the amount of energy transferred (and the resultant damage) during a collision.
Incentivizing smaller, lighter transportation options would help from both a public safety and insurance cost standpoint because all the safety features in the world can’t negate the basic laws of physics regarding things like momentum and visibility. The hazard large modern vehicles pose to others within their vicinity also suppresses cheaper modes of transit which increases the frequency that expensive vehicles are on the road, leading to even more vehicle collisions and insurer costs. Cars don’t need to be abolished, but they shouldn’t be the only tool we have left in the toolbox, transportation-wise.
This is wrong on top of wrong. First off, it’s 57 entities (including “Former Soviet Union”) producing 80% of the emissions tracked by the database – which covers “88% of total fossil fuel and cement emissions,” and totals 251G tonnes of CO2 equivalent gasses (CO2e) from 2016 through 2012 [1]. So with that we have 200Gt making up 70% of the global total over that 7 year period.
But fossil fuels and cement emissions are not the only source of greenhouse gasses. Human-caused global emissions are roughly 53GtCO2e annually during that time [2], for a total of 370Gt across all sources. So 200Gt is about 54% of that.
Most importantly though, this is a ridiculous measure in the first place. Who cares how many people are responsible for digging up the fuels that people are directly burning themselves in their homes and cars? If every oil well had its own company, how would that improve emissions? Nearly half of emissions are from individuals, and much of the rest is directly driven by consumer demand (e.g. power companies burning coal and gas).
So to most effectively address climate change we need individuals to change their behavior. So we can just tell everyone to do that, and we are all set, right? Clearly not. We need to:
Tax Carbon
Taxing “carbon” (really all GHG emissions) creates incentives for individuals and companies to use less, making trade-offs and choosing less carbon-intensive products. It moves the threshold for switching over to cleaner and more efficient technologies. People who refuse to acknowledge climate change will still change their behavior for personal benefit. People who want to make the world better will have more options and less reliance on company marketing/greenwashing.
As mentioned on that page, the best use of this tax is to give it back to everyone equally. Those who pollute less than average come out ahead. Those who pollute more pay for it in (indirect) taxes.
Why should it be illegal to have a relationship with someone you’re only related to by law? I mean yeah, naturally this will rarely ever happen and it’s kinda weird to think about, but something being weird is hardly a reason to ban it.
It’s actually extremely common, some guys will even be with hundreds of step sisters! Of course I get this knowledge from porn, but that’s not my point.
Why should it be illegal to have a relationship with someone you’re only related to by law?
Logically only the same reason you couldn’t have a relationship with first cousins. Inbreeding isn’t exactly a problem for first cousins, they’re genetically different enough for it to not have much of an affect until multiple generations of it (plus same-sex people, sterile people, people who just won’t have kids), so the only plausible argument for it is “marriages between family members are more likely to be from grooming/manipulation/abuse”. Which I don’t think is flawless reasoning to make it illegal, same thing could be said about many other perfectly legal types of relationships. But it is a reason.
That’s a fair point actually. Sometimes I forget how fucked up some people are. A ban would not necessarily help tho, because you can reverse or overturn an adoption under certain circumstances. So you could still groom all you want and then try to convince your adoptive child to leave the family and marry into it again (or maybe even force them somehow).
I think probing for grooming/wellbeing of the child might be a better way to handle this overall.
They are claiming the logo was not visible due to darkness but I’d like to see the footage to see how credible that claim is. I’m assuming they were watching with infrared camera, could you see such a logo with that technology?
From what we have recently learned the IDF is using dragnet surveillance and AI to choose targets. It’s purpose is purportedly rank every individual in Gaza a score 0 to 100. The higher your number, the more likely you are to get striked. The Intel released thus far indicates that the system gives you a higher score, the more Hamas members you associate with. I’m pretty sure the AI noticed the aid workers distributing aid and thus interacting with a large amount of Hamas -affiliated individuals and thus gained a rapid high score. And this is why AI should not make decisions.
Note, I am not stating that all the people the aid workers interact with are active Hamas militants just people that are related to or neighbors to which is close enough for most AI systems.
It's kinda crazy to think about, as a kid twenty some years ago I used to run around with friends up and down the street with you guns in our hands and we never got the cops called on us. We were white, of course.
We had bb guns. They launched actual projectiles and looked almost exactly like small caliber lever action rifles. I don’t think you could kill much (maybe mice?) with them but they’d send varmints running. When I got a little older, airsoft became a big thing. Some of those were super realistic and they were definitely more powerful than the old Daisy at the time. We never had the cops called, but we were white in a very rural white place.
Now I feel like Grandpa Simpson rambling with a story that isn’t going anywhere.
But apparently you want to give the cop the death penalty for shooting someone in the hand, which I think most people wouldn’t support.
I’d love for you to point to where I (as a person very open about my opposition to the death penalty) said this. I’d like to edit my post so that other people don’t have the same misunderstanding.
... You do realize that by this analogy closing the box just traps hope (whatever its analog would be) in the box with all the negatives already escaped right? That's like the whole point of Pandora's Box. Argue a different analogy if you think this one inapplicable, but within the framework of the analogy the consequences of the "close the container after the evils have escaped" plan is well established
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