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Mercury Spill

jefftk.com

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Re: Mercury Spill

#361

Post by crzwdjk »

shawnee_ wrote: post #256

Disagree with his last point here: (One thing this illustrates is that the downside risk of owning is much higher than with renting.) Financial risk, yes; health risk, no. Only a homeowner who owns and lives in the dwelling would care enough to follow the proper procedure for cleaning up a hazardous materials spill such as this. Landlords who invest in buildings (old, decrepit buildings) for the renters' income have…

In this case, I believe OP is actually a landlord, who invested in this old decrepit building for rental income. But what do you know, he has plenty of incentive to handle this situation as thoroughly as possible, because he lives there too! Moral of the story: "homeowner" and "landlord" are not mutually exclusive.

Re: Mercury Spill

#362

Post by gwern »

kragen wrote: post #358
gwern wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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…

you're saying you pay the spread because you're taking prices, not making them. diamonds have a huge spread at retail, and so you get screwed; gold's spread is so low that you can actually make money doing this, although more or less only by chance. i'd've expected mercury to be more like gold, but so far i can't find much evidence of a current functioning mercury market.

At least in the case of gold, there's a very large retail market with lots of connections to the investment market, and as far as I know, gold is easy & safe to store & refine, so if you sell some scrap gold to a gold dealer they don't have too much trouble refining it into something standardized. The rarer something is, and the more dangerous, the more you're going to pay in costs.

Re: Mercury Spill

#363

Post by FrankenPC »

cbr wrote: post #90
FrankenPC wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long have you owned the house? Toxic waste like that are grounds to sue the previous owner if not disclosed during the purchase...at least in California.

We bought the house in February. We might try to sue people, but it's pretty clear the previous owners don't have much money. (The house was mortgaged to within a few-k of the selling price, and they had stopped paying their monthly payments. Which made it pretty hard to actually buy the house! http://www.jefftk.com/p/house-buying-timeline )

So sorry you had to go through this. It's a legit homeowners nightmare. What could be worse? Some kind of crazy crawlspace mold outbreak?

Re: Mercury Spill

#364

Post by deciplex »

jstanley wrote: post #350
deciplex wrote: post #347

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.

It's complicated in the US because the person at fault is also on the hook for medical costs of any injured parties. The car insurance you get is mostly about taking care of that, not the property damage.

FWIW I didn't downvote you. Your post is borne of ignorance of how it works in the US, which is actually enviable because it means your healthcare system isn't an absolute wreck :-)

Re: Mercury Spill

#365

Post by radu_floricica »

logingone wrote: post #283
rbobby wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's justice got to do with anything? Insurance is a service, offered by a private entity to a private entity. You pay more in insurance than you're expected to pay for damages over a lifetime, but you get the peace of mind that comes from knowing you're not going to be bankrupt by an accident.

Sure, most industries benefit from a bit of regulation, but from that to "justice" is a long road.

Re: Mercury Spill

#366

Post by kragen »

gwern wrote: post #362
kragen wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're saying you pay the spread because you're taking prices, not making them. diamonds have a huge spread at retail, and so you get screwed; gold's spread is so low that you can actually make money doing this, although more or less only by chance. i'd've expected mercury to be more like gold, but so far i can't find much evidence of a current functioning mercury market.

At least in the case of gold, there's a very large retail market with lots of connections to the investment market, and as far as I know, gold is easy & safe to store & refine, so if you sell some scrap gold to a gold dealer they don't have too much trouble refining it into something standardized. The rarer something is, and the more dangerous, the more you're going to pay in costs.

Basically I agree with everything you say, with one exception. There are many methods to refine gold, but none of them are particularly safe, involving, for example, the evaporation of substantial amounts of mercury, gold cyanidation (what Turing's mother believed killed him), chlorine gas, or boiling aqua regia. This kind of thing can be made safe, but it's even more difficult than making mercury processing safe.

So I suspect that the main issue is storage and transportation, not refinement.

Re: Mercury Spill

#367

Post by beeboop »

cytzol wrote: post #338
alextgordon wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you lick your finger, if it is elemental mercury then probably nothing either. But don't try it!

Just curious: what would it need to be for it to do something? Not that I'm planning to...

Atomized somehow so that it would be inhaled.

Re: Mercury Spill

#368

Post by unicornporn »

cbr wrote: post #314
unicornporn wrote: post #249

Does anyone get near aroused by this kind of web design? I love it and wish every site could be "dumbed down" to this kind of easy navigation and reading experience. I know there are "reader views" in many modern browser, but I'd also like the site structure and navigation to be easier to overview. Sort of a WAP view for the twenty-tens.

Thanks! I'm glad you like the design. It's a slow evolution of doing the minimum necessary to keep raw html readable as things change. It started out as completely unstyled, then gained a max-width as screens got wider, and eventually a little bit of media-querying to make things look better on phones, but it's still really basic.

> It's a slow evolution of doing the minimum necessary to keep raw html readable as things change

I like it and I've been experimenting with exactly the same thing. However, it's kind of hard for me to not get carried away and start adding a superfluous line CSS here and there. :-)

How do you pull in the comments from multiple sources BTW? Is it a manual process?

Re: Mercury Spill

#369

Post by cbr »

unicornporn wrote: post #368
cbr wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I'm glad you like the design. It's a slow evolution of doing the minimum necessary to keep raw html readable as things change. It started out as completely unstyled, then gained a max-width as screens got wider, and eventually a little bit of media-querying to make things look better on phones, but it's still really basic.

> It's a slow evolution of doing the minimum necessary to keep raw html readable as things change I like it and I've been experimenting with exactly the same thing. However, it's kind of hard for me to not get carried away and start adding a superfluous line CSS here and there. :-) How do you pull in the comments from multiple sources BTW? Is it a manual process?

I pull the comments in with: https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/commen...

(Which isn't completely up to date; I have some changes I need to push public like hn-support.)

Re: Mercury Spill

#370

Post by TimothyGee »

hvidgaard wrote: post #261
mbroshi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies cannot credibly cover acts of god, aka correlated risks, because they happen to too many people all at once. It's not a simple matter of "fixing" insurance for those matters. NPR's Planet Money had a good discussion: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/03/353030214/bedbu...

The entire reason we buy insurance is to cover events like that, that one would be unable to cover personally. Of course they can cover. It's a matter of how much you pay for your insurance, and to a large degree how much they company saves up. In the case of a hailstorm it's not because they cannot pay, it's because they don't have proper savings to cover it. A hailstorm with fist size hails is not going to cover th…

This joint fund is called reinsurance- essentially insurance for insurance companies.
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