China didn't give them the choice lol

Insurance is risk protection. To use the example of a car, the risks including crashes, being stolen, and having a tree fall on it. You pay some money each month (your premium) and in return if one of the risks happens the company pays you. You are betting against yourself and the insurance company is taking the other side of that bet. Your rates going up is a sign that there is greater risk associated with you now. It could be additional cars, younger drivers with access to the car, or a history of accidents. Any of these things creates an additional likelihood of a risk happening, and the higher premium is a reflection of that greater risk.

Think of the insurance company like a bank. They take the money from everybody's premiums and put it in one big pool of money. Their "bet" is that the number of accidents their customers have will cost less in claims than the big pool of money. That means they have money left over and can use that money to hire more people, advertise, invest, etc. They lose money if they're wrong, and peoples' claims exceed the amount of money they took in.

So one thing they do to make sure they win this gamble is they employ people who are very good at statistics and data analysis called "actuaries". These peoples' job is to look over as much data as possible and come up with what the "risk" of people who fit certain profiles are. That "risk" helps the insurance company figure out how much it should charge for premiums. Actuaries are creepy good at this stuff, but mostly because statistical analysis is creepy accurate when looking at data based on millions of people over decades.

But an individual's level of risk is not the ONLY thing that impacts this. The economy definitely matters.

When I was a kid, a fancy car cost about $30,000 and you could do pretty well for about $15k. Today, finding decent cars for less than $20k is hard "fancy" cars are easily $80k. Now think about that. When my parents bought an $8,000 used car, that's the value they were trying to insure. Now, the same kind of car costs about $24,000. That means if I total the car, the insurance company owes me 3x as much as it owed my parents! So it follows that I probably should have to pay more to insure it.

This is kind of happening across the board. I had a conversation with my agent last year and he complained about it. Even small things like windshield cracks are going through the roof, because now windshields incorporate features like sensors to automatically turn on wipers or need special areas to facilitate built-in cameras and traffic assist sensors that also may need recalibrating. My car's front bumper has an array of 8 parking assist sensors that cost $200 EACH to replace, not to mention the labor involved with recalibrating them. My parents' car? The bumper by itself probably cost less than one of those sensors. So now if I get in a small accident that damages the bumper, it might cause $2,000-$3,000 worth of "damage" to the car.

Risk did not go down, but the costs of each accident have gone up. So there's the same number of accidents, but they cost more per claim. That means the insurance company needs a bigger "pool" of money, and the only way to get it is to raise premiums.

This is also happening in other insurance fields because of inflation and other factors. A house that cost $90,000 10 years ago and costs $400,000 today will, naturally, command a higher insurance cost.

Healthcare's constantly going up. There's a giant pandemic we decided would be convenient to ignore. It's leading to catastrophic numbers of deaths, and that translates to life insurance claims. It's also leading to an extra few million people facing some form of disability, which means medical treatment, which means more insurance payouts. More and more people are getting diabetes, which requires them to get insulin, which is excessively priced and leads to higher claims. We also split our "pool" of healthcare in the US among hundreds of different insurance companies instead of having one big "pool": that means each individual company has to work harder to make sure its "pool" is big enough so they don't go out of business. It also means they have to be pickier about what treatments they approve, which sometimes means someone isn't given preventative treatment so they later develop a more expensive chronic condition. (The insurance company sort of gambles that they die or get fired and thus lose coverage instead.)

Then you have to figure it's all connected. If you get in an accident, it's never JUST the cost of the car. You might owe something to the other person if you caused the accident and that might be part of the claim. There might be healthcare costs on either side. Since all of those are ballooning without bound it costs more, which costs insurance more, which means they charge you more.

All of this is making the size of the "pool" needed by insurance companies bigger. The more expensive everything gets, the more expensive insurance gets. The good news is the more expensive everything gets, the more money the people so rich they don't need insurance make!

Fair. But on the other hand, if all we have is models, is it not fair to say that fields do kind of work that way?

Yes. Both intensity of the illness, and intensity of the outbreaks.

Insurance companies are a "for profit" business. As their alleged costs to cover customer expenses go up, the rates we pay to be covered also go up. Just because you or someone you know hasn't had any claims, there are probably hundreds per day (or more) that do. With the costs of materials and labor going up, the have to charge us more to cover repairs and losses for all of their clients

That's the official/legal explanation anyway. In reality, it's more along the lines of we have to pay what they charge, or we're not allowed to drive. And since many, many of us need to drive in order to get by, they will charge what the market can bear

"The map is not the territory."

"All models are wrong, some are useful."

>Like prices for everything else in the world is going up right now so would that cause my insurance rate to increase?

Essentially this.

Risks are pooled in the insurance world. Your premium will rise or fall (lol) depending on the cost to pay claims associated with your pool. The frequency of accidents, break-ins, etc. in your market will determine how high the premium is, along with the cost of covering those events. When the costs associated with mechanical and body repair rise (as they have), the premium will rise as well.

When it comes to daily values for vitamins in food, 100% refers to the minimum amount a "normal" human being needs to be optimally healthy, and nothing more. How much over the optimal amount becomes toxic varies widely from vitamin to vitamin, so the DV doesn't really say how much you have to go over the DV value before you start feeling ill effects.

For example, the 100% Daily Value for Vitamin A is 3,000 IU, while the amount needed for it to become toxic is about 300,000 (for a single use) or about 30,000 (if you're doing it every day for an extended period of time), which correspond to 10000% and 1000% of the daily value, respectively.

Very much no. The EM field isn't a medium. None of the quantum fields are.

Just by observation.

Even without germ theory per se, back as far as ancient China, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, people could tell that exposure to SOMETHING caused disease. Night air? The moon? Miasma? Insect bites?

Keeping the sick away from everybody else, and noting that people got sick around sick people doesn't require the direct knowledge that micro-organisms are responsible.

> Fields don't work that way.

AFAIK they don't not work that way. A lot of particle physics and particle interactions and fields can be accurately modeled using carefully designed water tanks.

Insurance companies make money by collecting premiums and denying claims. Once you've proven to be a greater liability to insure than originally expected, your rates go up and typically stay there. This is also why insurance company commercials are so prevalent. The idea of saving money on premiums by switching insurance companies is the prevailing strategy of the accident-prone masses.

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You become immune by surviving the disease. For some they will show no symptoms and it seems like they were always immune. Many will develop symptoms of varying severity and survive the infection. Now they have some immunity to the disease.

You either survive and gain immunity or die.

It takes millions of years to change. The amount of O2 in the atmosphere is large compared to the amount of organic carbon in the biosphere and the available fossil fuels, so burning the biosphere (trees mostly) and fossil fuels don't change the amount of O2 that much.

Over millions of years, oxygen oxidize metals and carbons brought by volcanoes and then exposed through erosion, so oxygen level can go down. This is opposed by having living beings producing organic carbon-rich sediments that becomes rocks under water. Though a small percentage of those rocks are coal, most of it don't contain enough carbon to be fossil fuel or are too deep under ground.

Over millions of year the oxygen level change. It is believed it peaked at some 30% in earlier times. Also, it has been close to 0% for billion of years (it took a long time for oxygen produced by life to oxidize all the already available metals, mostly iron).

The amount of CO2 changes fast because there is very little CO2 naturally in the atmosphere. That's because CO2 is very soluble in water and also combine easily with ions such as calcium ions to make carbonated rocks. So over million of years, CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't change much even though O2 changes a lot. If you include the CO2 in the ocean and the carbonated rocks then it changes a lot. That's also why we say that the CO2 we put in the atmosphere will last about 100 years. If we were to stop putting more CO2 in the atmosphere, it would go down to its previous levels by the ocean absorbing the CO2 in about 100 years.

And yet if you mix red and blue light together my brain perceives it very similarly to violet, so if the rods and cones are not doing that, what is?

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It's not just mouse movement. It has a ton of data on how you are interacting with the browser and uses all of it to determine if you are a bot or not. If it's not confident you are a human you get to answer a captcha. Some just ask you to answer a captcha every time.

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In Italy we call them “battiscopa” which means “broom guard” and that’s what it does. When you mop or broom the floor you need to work close to the wall most time because it’s where most of the dirt is.

Now, without “broom guards” you will stain and damage the wall during time. “Broom guards” can be replaced easily and at a way lower cost than a wall repair. Bonus point, you can repaint stained “broom guards” without having to repaint the entire wall for consistency.

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4 main uses jump to mind immediately.

• Covers the rough joint between plaster and floor.

• Covers the edge of the floor, hiding poor cuts, and allowing space for expansion or shifting without bowing (more important for wood floors).

• Protects the bottom of the wall from impact damage. Shoes, furniture, vacuum cleaners or water from mopping all damage plaster. The skirting board acts as a kick shield. Wood holds up far better, and gloss paint is waterproof.

• Appearance - when you don't have a skirting board, the walls can look particularly bland. It sounds trite, but it's definitely noticeable.