For what it's worth, insurance companies actually are charging a "fair" price, in the sense that most years, the amount that they take in in premium and the amount they pay in claims work out to be nearly even. They're not doing that out of the goodness of their heart - they're doing it because it maximizes their market share; if they don't set those rates, another company will, and they'll be priced out. The profit margins on "additional" coverages like comprehensive and collision tend to be a bit higher, but on basic liability and property, they're actually aiming to break even, or as close as possible. That ensures the biggest market share from people who want to pay their cheap rate, without too much risk of losing more than they bring in.

They make their money primarily just on investing that premium while they have it, along with some added income from fees that they charge outside of normal premium. Really, the only type of insurance that usually doesn't follow that pattern is whole life - they actually nearly always pay out more in claims than they take in premium, but that's balanced out by the fact that they get to hold on to the money for so long, they make back a much better investment profit anyways.

Re: your Aspirin example.

Food is of course a matter of taste and name brand food items are often (but not always!) simply different from generics. But I can’t for the life of me see why you’d buy name brand OTC meds besides allergies or maybe a kid who has to have the superhero packaging or a very specific version of artificial cherry flavor

You mean like the ones who will only buy Chevy because their daddy drove a Chevy, and his daddy drove a chevy...? :)

The newly built maximum security prison in El Salvador has some space built for isolation.
Couldn't find it in English, but here you can see their equivalents to the hole:
https://youtu.be/QMkkRwx77Zg?t=265
The whole video is interesting if you want to know how a maximum security prison looks inside and outside (There's a 30min video from the day the inaugurated it)

You should probably indicate that you're quoting from the article...

On the plus side, assuming (admittedly rather boldly) that there's any life left in the universe by then, Mars will be in the temperature range that Earth once was.

Iced coffee whipped cream!

My FIL had a '98 Honda CR-V that had almost 200k miles until it racked up too much in repairs to keep. I told myself when I was in the market, I was definitely going for a Honda.

The time came and I got a used 2012 Civic with 35k miles. Now the car's 11 years old, around 160k miles and still going strong. Building to less than exceptional reliability seems like a terrible business decision unless you go strictly for the customers for whom money is no object, and/or the ones with more dollars than sense.

With Starbucks they’re over brewing typically because their customers don’t like the taste of coffee so much but coffee flavored cream and sugar. When you’re drinking just black coffee it’s not for you.

Although their nitro is the way to go if you like smooth black coffee.

>If the ask is about the probability of rolling a sequence and you've already rolled some, then you can't ignore what's been rolled so far.

This is exactly what you do. If you want to know the probability of rolling 6 6s in a row, you calculate it for that. If you've rolled 3 out of 6 and want to know the probability of making it to 6 straight, you do the very basic 6 - 3 = 3, and then crunch the probability for only 3 rolls, because you are only actually calculating the probability of 3 rolls.

Your "preservation of information" is a simple subtraction. It's not some mystical connection influencing future rolls. All those future rolls are still entirely independent of the ones you've already made.

The probability of rolling the same on 6 dice, and the probability of rolling 3 of the same having already rolled 3 are identical, because you're still rolling 6 dice.

The probability of rolling 3 more of the same after any arbitrary amount is not the same question. This is where your confusion is coming from. Here, you only need the probability of 3 rolls, no matter how many you've rolled previously.

Even with that, countries do recycle numbers when they go out of service. Sometimes you'll get texts or calls from people's contacts who previously owned your number.

Was the rats thing not recently called into question?

Oh, you mean Cheese-it’s

The vast majority of what a coffee shop sells isn't actually coffee, it's mostly selling milk. And milk is surprisingly expensive.

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> double whammy

No whammy, no whammy, no whammy. Aww damn, plague

This was going to be my answer. It’s all about perception. There’s not likely much difference between a cheap cup of coffee and a high end one, but the perception, at least to the consumer, is the more expensive coffee must be better. It’s possible/likely the more expensive cup tastes slightly better, but to the multiple they charge, unlikely.

My mind is absolutely blown. This is an amazing answer. I need you in my everyday life.

Itemized deductions vs standard deductions?

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Apparently it’s 7.9 billion combos available

I don't know about modern charging cords, but not very long ago some Apple USB/charging cables had slightly "non-standard" value termination/load resistors (passive components costing less than a cent) in them, which meant the Apple device could tell whether it was an "Apple" cable or a generic standard one...

When you run a business by quarterly reports that can happen.

It won't, directly.

Earth, however, will likely be uninhabitable long before then (barring human actions). The Sun is growing hotter as it ages, and Earth has about another billion years left before the Sun's warming trend begins to evaporate our oceans and trigger a Venus-esque runaway greenhouse effect.