351–360 of 374 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mandatory insurance is for the injury and property damage you cause , not that you incur.
Yes but any damage that is caused by one party is also incurred by another party. In the "no mandatory insurance" scenario, you're taking the risk that someone else may damage your car. So don't buy a car you can't afford to replace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mandatory insurance is for the injury and property damage you cause , not that you incur.
Yes but any damage that is caused by one party is also incurred by another party. In the "no mandatory insurance" scenario, you're taking the risk that someone else may damage your car. So don't buy a car you can't afford to replace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mandatory insurance is for the injury and property damage you cause , not that you incur.
Yes but any damage that is caused by one party is also incurred by another party. In the "no mandatory insurance" scenario, you're taking the risk that someone else may damage your car. So don't buy a car you can't afford to replace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That document says, "People often keep jars of mercury in their homes because they think that mercury is worth money, like liquid silver. In reality, mercury is nearly worthless, but the cleanup cost after a large spill easily can exceed the cost of a home." http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/mercury/mcs... gives the price of mercury as US$1850 per 76-pound flask, up from US$1076 in 2010. That's US$54/k…
I'm not sure it's exaggeration. Who do you sell your jug of mercury to at $1850/flask...? Would any scientific or industrial consumer want to buy random flasks of unknown quality from laymen at fair prices? Just quoting bulk commodity prices for mercury is like noting that a particular diamond costs you $2k at the department store and assuming that you must then have an asset worth $2k.
The recycling shop in the slum has to deal with the same issues with the copper they handle. My price from his sign was out of date, perhaps due to our world-leading inflation: he pays AR$45 per kilo, which is US$2.87. The difference between that US$2.87/kg and the US$5.31/kg that CME copper contracts trade at is exactly the cost of converting random chunks of copper of unknown quality bought from laymen into copper acceptable to scientific and industrial consumers, plus his profit.
If you're not a neoliberal, you could reasonably argue that it's unfair that the junk man pays you only half of the bulk commodity price for your copper. This does not defeat the point that the price he pays is sufficient to motivate people to aggressively recycle copper. In fact, even the AR$8/kg he pays for aluminum is high enough that cartoneros remove heatsinks from discarded computers.
Maybe whoever handles mercury recycling in the US is willing to pay somewhere between 25% and 50% of the bulk commodity price for jugs of metallic mercury of unknown purity. In fact, maybe they'd be willing to pay even more: maybe removing the impurities from a kilogram of impure mercury only costs one to five times as much as removing the impurities from a kilogram of impure copper, not ten times as much. The USGS report I linked notes that more than 50 companies in the US currently collect mercury for recycling from "Mercury-containing automobile convenience switches, barometers, compact and traditional fluorescent lamps, computers, dental amalgam, medical devices, thermostats, and some mercury-containing toys," and even more companies collect metallic mercury.
…that said, my attempts to find offers in the US on the internet to buy mercury for recycling for anything approaching US$54/kg are not finding anything. At all. So maybe the EPA guy is, in practice, correct.
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The underlying problem is that insurance companies are allowed to segment their customer base by risk. For low risk customers this is great because they get a cheap rate. For the companies it's great because they get to advertise a cheap rate and attract customers (and run really lean administratively... don't need a lot of claims handlers etc). Things go off the rails though for customers perceived as high risk. Gro…
Isn't the problem that the government, which is supposed to uphold justice, let's it go on?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure it's exaggeration. Who do you sell your jug of mercury to at $1850/flask...? Would any scientific or industrial consumer want to buy random flasks of unknown quality from laymen at fair prices? Just quoting bulk commodity prices for mercury is like noting that a particular diamond costs you $2k at the department store and assuming that you must then have an asset worth $2k.
Your analogy is a little off: $2k at the department store is not $2k in the Antwerp diamond markets. The USGS prices are for wholesale markets, not retail mercury. The recycling shop in the slum has to deal with the same issues with the copper they handle. My price from his sign was out of date, perhaps due to our world-leading inflation: he pays AR$45 per kilo, which is US$2.87. The difference between that US$2.87/k…
A retail consumer investor, who is storing it in their home, is paying retail consumer prices. They aren't showing up at the cinnabar mines and tapping a spigot for bulk prices. My diamond analogy is exactly correct. That's why it's a scam: because you are paying inflated prices for something you cannot possibly sell at anything remotely like what you paid for it, and in the case of mercury, it's worse than if you bought some diamonds because at least diamonds aren't ticking timebombs.
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> What's the point of buying insurance then 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.
Which government requires insurance on a private home? Mortgage lenders make homeowner's insurance a condition of the loan to protect their assets. I've never heard of a state requirement for homeowner's insurance. I'm in the US, though. Might be different elsewhere.
This is codified in law by parliament as the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004, Section 18, Obligation of owner to insure - http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2004/11/section/18
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your analogy is a little off: $2k at the department store is not $2k in the Antwerp diamond markets. The USGS prices are for wholesale markets, not retail mercury. The recycling shop in the slum has to deal with the same issues with the copper they handle. My price from his sign was out of date, perhaps due to our world-leading inflation: he pays AR$45 per kilo, which is US$2.87. The difference between that US$2.87/k…
> $2k at the department store is not $2k in the Antwerp diamond markets. The USGS prices are for wholesale markets, not retail mercury. A retail consumer investor, who is storing it in their home, is paying retail consumer prices. They aren't showing up at the cinnabar mines and tapping a spigot for bulk prices. My diamond analogy is exactly correct. That's why it's a scam: because you are paying inflated prices for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I talked to a lawyer, who didn't think we'd be likely to succeed if we tried to get the insurance company to pay anyway. They did think whoever owned the house at the time of the spill would be liable, but it would be hard to prove that the spill happened at a certain time and they may not have the money. Right from the article. Sounds like there have been multiple owners, no way to assign blame. Last owner probabl…
I'm not sure, but maybe this is something title insurance is supposed to cover?
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Breathing the fumes for an extended period of time? That's exactly what we would have had without the remediation.
Not necessarily, since there was nothing to vaporize it. He even shows an old picture he'd taken of it where the drops had sat undisturbed for so long that they had a chance to oxidize.
(Post author here.)