161–170 of 374 posts
Is there anything else in the modern world where we still uses mercury in this large amount of quantity? If so why?
(I'm not sure how much Mercury the telescope uses.)
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Insurance is such a scam. A friend of mine made two claims within about five years: once for water damage and once for a burglary. The insurance company agreed that she was covered. So they paid her and then dropped her. No big deal, right? Wrong. Once you've made a claim or two against your insurance, it can be very hard to get any new insurance company to cover you. She finally did find a new insurer, but the price…
No shit. What's the point of buying insurance then? I had septic tank back flow into my basement due to a design defect that was put in PRIOR to my purchase of the house. Insurance paid up then dropped me. Second insurance doubled the premium stating I'm a high risk. I was like WTF? This was a design defect that has been fixed. It's not like I'm a slob and let the house fall apart. It's a relatively new house. What's…
Unfortunately, just like for many things, government makes it mandatory to buy insurance for many of your properties. So the scam can go on and on forever.
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"Because of this, I avoid making any claims unless absolutely required." This is economically efficient behavior - and in fact you should set your deductible to the highest amount you can afford out-of-pocket, as insurance is really only efficient for amounts above that. You should be aiming towards insuring catastrophic loss - eg, a fire that burns your whole house down.
Insurance in my understanding is good for catastrophic events. If house burning down happen in 1 of 10000 homes in a lifetime, and all have taken insurance. For a small sum, you have ensured that you'll not be homeless, instead of each 10000 owners saving enough for a new house.
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> The expected value of insurance is not automatically negative. I'm curious how this math works. In my (quite likely incomplete) mental model of insurance, there are only a few terms: premiums, payouts, profits. It would seem that they have to balance. So if you pool risk, you are summing the payouts. Those payouts are covered by the sum of premiums. Any profit is the sum of premiums minus the sum of payouts. Profit…
Insurance companies need a lot of cash on hand to cover low probability events. However, they can invest this money, so things like life insurance where risks increase over time but the premiums are fixed, can end up with a higher average payout than insurance premium, the difference being time value of money. In other words you end up paying the opportunity cost, but not nessisarily a nominal cost in the long term.
Is there anything else in the modern world where we still uses mercury in this large amount of quantity? If so why?
Also, we burn lots of coal. And coal contains mercury.
Anyway see this cool EPA page: http://www2.epa.gov/international-cooperation/mercury-emissi...
This does seem like a good case for small claims court against Honeywell. It's probably limited in what they could recover but they could at least get some of that back.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2015/10/08/dupont-found-liable-in-c...
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Health insurance is somewhat the same too... Hospitals and Dentists have special rates for insured patients (much higher)... you can end up paying the same as an uninsured patient... Which is why I was getting hospitalization-only insurance, but with Obama-care, I can't do that anymore. Also, I have been told that it might be illegal to claim that you are uninsured, pay the bill and then get reimbursed by your insura…
That's very strange. Not saying it didn't happen to you, but to my knowledge, most medical professionals charge insured patients much LESS than insured ones, because insurance companies negotiate special rates. My wife had to have an intensive surgery a few years ago. The total bill amounted to over $100,000. Insurance negotiated it down to $25,000 or so, and then paid 90% of the balance. That's pretty typical of my…
In the end he is using the $50k expense as an argument for renting instead of buying. I am wondering, if you were to rent, would your landlord actually cover this? Sounds like that would be equally hard as claiming it on insurance or previous owner of house. I can imagine the response being something along "our janitor was qualified to clean it up and you shouldn't have called haz team" or simply that the leak wasn't…
I had a physics class in a community college that had us handling open containers of mercury for our experiments. It was maybe 15 years ago. Someone in one of the classes managed to knock one of the jars over, and mercury spilled everywhere on the floor. Either the students hid their spill from the staff, or the staff just had some janitors do a simple sweeping of it, because I noticed spheres of mercury everywhere i…
I remember playing with mercury when I was a kid, rolling it around in my hands, etc. Luckily it was only on one occasion, not something you'd want to make a habit of I guess.
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(3) clean it up with a dustpan :-D Seriously, mercury is not dangerous unless inhaled or ingested. Suit up with a cheap hazmat and gloves and clean away...
Yeha, I'm a bit dumbfounded about the calling of the fire dept, the reaction and so on. I would have just figured out where it was coming from and cleaned it up myself with some gloves and a dustpan.
This is probably why you don't clean up mercury for a living. You don't know the complications until you're taught them.