> there was a dusy little puddle what's a dusy?
reworded:
there was a [little puddle that was dusty]
Mercury Spill
151–160 of 374 posts
Re: Mercury Spill
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? The point of insurance is to pool risk . The expected value of insurance is not automatically negative. Look up the term "actuarially fair". Yes, there is moral hazard in insurance and it is sometimes necessary to exclude bad actors to prevent markets from unraveling, but to not to the extent which has become common in many sectors. Your whole post reads like an specious apology for bad behavior in the insuranc…
> 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.
Re: Mercury Spill
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
I had a big name health insurance company through a company policy which actually mandated that I pay a certain minimum for drugs purchased at the pharmacy. If I used the card and bought a generic which would normally cost say $9, I'd pay $20. Use the card, pay more than retail.
Re: Mercury Spill
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC one time touching cold liquid elemental mercury isn't that bad, the short-term problem is breathing mercury fumes or encountering various compounds that it can react to form. Any sort of persistent chronic exposure is definitely bad, of course, since like most "heavy metals" it accumulates and has long-term effects.
If you haven't seen mercury vapors under an ultraviolet light, it's quite dramatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JABbofwD3MI
It looks like same happens with dental amalgam fillings too (which also contains mercury):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw94F94FZqA
Most say it's safe (the FDA too) and that video just shows water vapor because mercury vapor wouldn't rise like that due to it's weight, but I'm not sure what to believe.
http://quackfiles.blogspot.hu/2005/04/smoking-teeth-truth-ge...
Re: Mercury Spill
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with you that you should only insure the risk you can’t carry yourself there should be a profitable business opportunity insuring individuals that have been dropped by other companies provided the reason from the drop is not predictive of future risk.
I am pretty sure that insurance companies know this. I bet that they have data showing that, even in cases where it seems like the cause of a claim was outside a person's control, that person is still more likely to make a second claim than someone who has never made a claim.
I would think so too, but I would not be surprised if there is some sort of industry wide collusion to not try and change the situation. The key is separating out the risks that are truly higher from those that are not. If they are applying this as a blanket policy on all claimants it suggests that collusion is the culprit.
Re: Mercury Spill
#156Is there anything else in the modern world where we still uses mercury in this large amount of quantity?
If so why?
Re: Mercury Spill
#157I wonder how this kind of thing plays out for people that don't have anywhere near $50k available. I'm assuming since the company worked first and then invoiced, that the options would be either (1) sell the house and use the proceeds (assuming equity exists) to pay off the cleaning, or (2) declare bankruptcy. If the company were to require pre-payment for cleaning, then it's really just down to either (1) abandon an…
You're forgetting (3): get the shopvac, vacuum it all up, and then dump it in the back yard. And yes, I know people that would do exactly that.
Seriously, NO!! If anyone ever reads this do NOT use a shopvac. You will make the problem 10000x worse. Mercury is only an acute health hazard if vaporized. A shopvac will instantly vaporize it. You will turn an expensive and irritating headache into a medical and possibly life-threatening emergency.
Re: Mercury Spill
#158This sounds so familiar... Here's a story about my 1961 house that is built on concrete slabs. About 18 months ago, we noticed a bit of the hardwood floor was bubbling up. We ignored it. About 6 months ago, our water pressure started to drop and then disappeared altogether. The plumber came and told us that our well pump (which was relatively new) wasn't working. They pulled the pump and the PVC bushing around it was…
Uhhh, at that point doesn't it make sense to just tear it down and rebuild?
Re: Mercury Spill
#159In 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 their fault. On the other hand you can easily bail out and just rent another place, unless the queue to get a rental is 3years+ in your city.
Re: Mercury Spill
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
take people's money and don't do shit That's not what they do, though. They are in business to make money, yes -- but they don't always. A bad hurricane season and they can (and do) lose billions.
Yeah, it costs a lot to hire inspectors to go out to every property and determine that it was the water in the air, not the wind itself that destroyed the house so they aren't covered.
Cynical and false.
http://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/paper_HurricaneAndrew...
Katrina: $47.6 billion paid out. Andrew: $25.0 billion paid out. Ike: $13.1 billion paid out. (Constant 2011 dollars.)
See discussion of "wind pool" in the document, by the way: the way Florida works is by having a semi-governmental organization insure wind damage and letting private insurance companies sell "we'll insure any risk as long as it isn't wind damage" policies.