Time and talent

Just because you're good at acting doesn't mean you're good at business arrangements, negotiation, scheduling, and finding opportunities. And once you start getting jobs you won't have time to look for the next one which could need to be lined up months out

The whole job of the agent is to look for and make arrangements for jobs. They have time dedicated to that task since they aren't trying to shuffle between doing the thing that makes money(acting) and lining up the next job, the thing that makes money for the agent is lining up the next job. They're also going to have the right network for it, again because its what they do. Agencies will also represent multiple people so while Client A isn't the right guy for every job they can still land jobs for Client A and use Clients B-Z for the other openings they're better suited for

Generalists aren't great at any task, this is why we tend towards specialists

Plus all the energy it takes to burn the beans

that would be a stretch to say that Europeans in general got more resistance. The mutation offering more protection or even immunity did significanly spread in the gene pool, that is true. However, that would fail to explain why the outbreak in London (to give an example) in 1666 claimed so many dead.

If I recall correctly it is estimated that about 90% of the native american population died because of unknown diseases. However, some of those became endemic later on. Plague didn't (nor did that other scourge: smallpox). Plague is therefore one of those diseases that IF found by a doctor, must be reported to the national health authorities almost immediatly (as: within 24 hours) in my country.

The 1348 outbreak coincided with a period of bad harvests and relative overpopulation. Resulting in lower resistance among the populace. It was, in the words suitable for a five year old: a double whammy

Models etc could be their own agent in theory. Some of them are. Im freelance and get some work through agencies and some work through my own methods.

Imagine you have a large service based business. You have the employees that provide the service and you have employees that are in the sales team. It makes sense to have these as two separate departments because the skill sets are different. Agents are basically sales reps. If there’s a problem the client goes to them. When you’re actually working, they’re looking for the next job for you. Agents also have a large set of contacts that they can call upon to look for work. Theyre the ones that are good at networking and talking clients into hiring you. They’re the ones that show up in google first.

If you’re a client looking for a model or actor, you don’t have time to go through endless google pages for independent models. What you want is to go to an agent and describe what you’re looking for, then they utilize their extensive talent pool to get you what you need fast and efficiently. They’ll also probably find a better model for your needs than you could find yourself. That is why clients will be willing to pay more to use an agency.

Starbuck's margin is about 10 to 10.5%. They have massive scale and buying power.

It isn't the cost of the coffee. It is the rent, labor, insurance, marketing costs, etc, etc.

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Well, the agent is the person who brings the work to these artists. They basically look for auditions, openings or any other opportunities. Since most artists are unaware of how the business side of things work they have their agent do that for them and the agent gets paid. This is basically for Artists who aren't fully successful and can't really hire a manager to do all this full time for them.

It works exactly like you looking around a room. Large objects take up more space in your vision so it's easier to see. Smaller objects are harder to spot. Transparent objects are even harder to see.

Radar works like your eyes, except you can't really see the details of the object. Just how big it is, like you are really near sided and everything is just blurry shapes in the distance. With stealth, they shape the object to make it mostly transparent to radar, like a glass window for visible light. They also use radar absorbent materials, which is like painting an object black to hide it in a dark room. Both of these reduce the radar cross section.

Radar cross section could be used to approximate what a jet would look like on radar relevant to other things and basically describes how easy it is to spot on radar.

there is a difference between the normal one and the one in the lungs (that's 99% lethal).

The intensity depends on two other factors:

1. response of local authorities (which over the course of the centuries became more adept at dealing with outbreaks: one such measure was quarantaining (The Venetians had an island for that), ships using special flags to signal the disease on board, etc. The duke of Milan infamously bricked in any house that had a patient in it: harsh but it worked.

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2. the health of the population: as mentioned before, resistance did improve in the population, HOWEVER: famines (either due to war or bad harvests) impacted the health of the population that was affected by an outbreak.

TLDR: It's not worth it, and it won't work.

"Specialty" coffees (e.g. espresso-based) require a significant investment in equipment and training. Trying to significantly undercut say Starbucks will require a lot of sunk costs up front. In other words, you will not be able to undercut them and turn a sufficient profit until you're established.

Furthermore, people are (generally) OK with paying current costs for specialty drinks. If you started up a coffee shop and sold drinks at half of *$ cost, you wouldn't suddenly have a lineup of customers. Marketing to actually get people in the door will cost a lot, especially when you're up against the behemoth competition.

BUT, let's say for the sake of argument, that you manage it. You have established yourself as a popular destination that makes good drinks for three bucks less than then competition. You've opened up a few franchises, and things are going well.

That's when Starbucks (or whoever) drops their price by $3.50 to squeeze you out. They can afford it. They can afford to give coffee away for probably six months in a major single market, without suffering too much.

Other TLDR: Capitalism is cruel.

There are actually three types of Plague, all from the same bacteria. The most common one, Bubonic Plague infects the lymph nodes, but it can be airborne as pneumonic plague as well. The most serious form is septicemic plague, which is the lease common because you generally die within 24 hours of symptoms presenting without massive doses of antibiotics

When we talk about markup like that, we're only including the cost of the raw ingredients - beans and water. We're not talking about the other costs of running a business.

Paying rent on the location, building and maintaining the cafe, keeping utilities on, paying employees, advertising, insurance etc. all add up to significantly more than the cost of the raw ingredients. Add all of that stuff together, and it's not like your local coffee place is running an 80% profit margin. They're managing a few percent. And if they run a profit of more than a few percent, then someone else will come in and undercut them - either taking a share of their customers, or forcing them to drop prices back down. It happens all the time.

That's why if you ever tell them "hey, I didn't like this coffee," they'll make you a new one, no questions asked. The cup of coffee is pennies lost for them; all of the other costs stay the same. They'd rather have a happy customer and lose those pennies than risk their future profit.

insider trading isn't illegal because it makes things unfair, it's illegal because it's theft - misappropriation of company info for personal benefit. if I give my golf buddy a heads up my company is acquiring AcmeCo next week and he trades on that and hands me a fat sack of cash at the bar, then that's illegal. I'm using company info to help my friend and deriving a personal benefit from it.

it's illegal because I hurt my shareholders - my buddy bought AcmeCo, which drove the price up doing so, and my company had to pay a higher price for AcmeCo as a result. it's a bit like taking the company car for a joy ride, the shareholders are fine with you having a company car, just not destroying it wrecklessly.

if my friend, on the other hand, happened to be on a train with my CEO, and he saw a note fall out of the CEO's briefcase, a note which told him AcmeCo would be acquired next week and he traded on that info, then that is fine, really. shareholders were still harmed and they might not be happy with the CEO, but nothing was stolen, no duty was breached.

to bring this back to your question - they do a couple of things to limit the perception of trading on material info for personal benefit.

• there are blackout periods around quarterly reports where people who work for the firm can't trade.
• they buy/sell in a process-oriented fashion (around the same time every year)
• they abstain from trading when there is material information being discussed, like a merger, even outside of blackout periods
• they invest for the long term by buying the actual stock and not, like, short dated out of the money call options the day before a surprise earnings announcement.

at the end of the day, the C suite of a company is going to be highly scrutinized in their trading activity to make sure they aren't doing anything funny like that, and the above is the accepted way of doing so.

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Insurance broker here! The primary cause of auto insurance increases (especially in the US) over the past two decades has been skyrocketing healthcare costs - and this also affects business's liability and workers' comp insurances (which pass along to the consumer) as well as personal homeowners insurance, because that also includes liability.

The property damage of an accident is usually pretty limited - a few new parts, the occasional totaled car, but these are all costs with a reasonable limit. But healthcare costs rising means that the liability is increasing - even a minor accident with mild whiplash can wind up costing thousands of dollars in medical costs, and accidents with serious bodily injury will quickly add up or hit even hit the insurance limits.

Right now specifically, because of the state of the economy, aftershocks of the supply chain issues and worker shortages, the property damage is actually becoming a bigger factor. A lot of property insurance rates are going way up right now, for exactly that reason, and it's affecting the auto rates as well. But the economic factors like that are going to come and go - the constant for several decades now has been the factor that healthcare costs play on the liability side of your insurance; that's what's generating the majority of the premium that you're paying for auto coverage.

Trial and error

They discovered that people who kept clean didn't get as sick

The Pope famously hid in a circle of flame to keep him safe during the worst of the plague. The theory was to keep 'bad air' away, but in fact it was keeping him safe from the rats

Like everything else. You get it, and survive.

Also, plague did mutate, and morphed through history. When people got bitten by fleas it wasn't as deadly (still bad) as when transmission person to person (by coughing) became possible.

Well one, no, violet is quite a distinct color from magneta (the color you get by mixing blue and red light, i.e., "purple"). They're not hugely far apart, but e.g. on this chromaticity diagram, violet is at the bottom while mixtures of blue and red light form a magenta shade bottom-right of center. Magenta and violet are as different as red and yellow or green and cyan.

But the answer to your question is that you distinguish blues from purples by how different the signals from your M and L cones are. In both colors, the S cones are stimulated. If L > M, you see purples. If L ~ M, you see violet. If M > L, you see blues. At the far violet end of the spectrum, both L and M are near zero. At the far red end of the spectrum, L > M but both are weak, so combining that with blue produces high S, low-but-positive L-M (as opposed to high S, ~zero L-M for violet). The difference L - M is not hugely different between violet and purple, which is why they are similar-ish looking.

Like everything else. You get it, and survive.

Also, plague did mutate, and morphed through history. When people got bitten by fleas it wasn't as deadly (still bad) as when transmission person to person (by coughing) became possible.

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No, because a tank of water isn't the same as a field, it's just a useful way to model some aspects of how fields behave within certain limits. Outside of the limits its designed to accurately model, allegories are more misleading than illuminating.

Take Newton's version of gravitation for example, it's a great model! For everything you're going to encounter on Earth and can measure with the instruments of the day, it was very accurate. The only way you could tell that there were holes in the model was through observation of things like the precession of Mercury's orbit. The reality however is that Newton's model is deeply wrong, gravity isn't a fundamental force which acts instantaneously across space.

That model was then replaced by Einstein's model of gravitation, in the form of his field equations, which describes gravity as an apparent force emerging from the curvature of spacetime. This apparent force no longer acts instantaneously, and these corrections explained Mercury's orbit and a lot more.

If you use Newton's model you can build rockets to visit planets in the Solar system. If you use Newton's model to build a GPS system though, it would be useless, without Relativistic corrections the system fails in days at the most. Einstein's model seems pretty much perfect, you need to go to some pretty exotic places to see where the model breaks down, such as the interior of a black hole.

But it's important to remember that models are what we use to illustrate reality, or make predictions about reality, but models are not reality.

The map is not the territory.

Rates go up based on expected costs to cover... if parts and repair labor costs go up, so does insurance. If replacement vehicle costs in case of vehicle being totaled go up (and check out the insane increase in used car prices the past couple years), then insurance goes up. If natural disasters damage/destroy vehicles more often, insurance rates go up. If theft rates go up (looking at you, Kia and Hyundai), then rates go up. And then there is simple inflation... when it costs more to hire employees, to rent offices, pay for office supplies, etc. then costs go up.

How do you know there is no gold in the food or water you are drinking? 0.2 mg is a very small amount.

Not in the sense we usually use the word medium. For sound, the air is there wether or not there's a sound wave. The ocean is there wether or not there's a wave. But for an EM wave, there's no background EM field in empty space (at least classically) unless there's a wave going through.