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On Amendment 3

Have you been to New York, Denver, or Las Vegas? The smell is absolutely pervasive. Even with only “medical” marijuana being legal here, we see a parade of people who are suffering from cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome- a malady where they smoke so much weed that they spend a good chunk of time every day throwing up, yet they won’t take our advice and smoke less weed.

By Divemedic, ago

Update

The local press is saying that Milton will make landfall right about in Venice, which is south of Tampa. I don’t know about that. I am no weather expert, but I can look at a map. The NHC says the hurricane as of noon is at 26.0N, 84.2W and moving at 17 mph at a heading of 035deg. This website draws me a map where you can put in starting coordinates, heading, and speed, and this is what it shows for 10 hours worth of movement:

In order to come ashore at Venice, it needs to take a pretty hard turn, and the longer it waits, the harder the turn will be needed.

By Divemedic, ago

DeSantis Takes Action

Every time there is a strike from a national union, we hear stories of union members committing violent acts to keep others from going on with their lives without the union’s blessing. I remember a Greyhound being shot at during a teamsters’ strike years ago. The leader of the longshoremen threatened to “cripple” us. The Governor of Florida took action to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

By Divemedic, ago

What Is Insurance?

Insurance is nothing more than a shared risk pool. One of the basic principles of insurance is that of risk sharing. The definition of risk sharing is nothing more than using strategies to mitigate the consequences of adverse events by spreading the potential burden across multiple stakeholders. 

The insured pays a premium in exchange for the insurer’s promise to cover the costs of certain losses, should they occur. This arrangement allows the insured to manage their financial exposure to risks, while the insurer pools the premiums from multiple policyholders to cover claims and maintain profitability.

Let’s start with life insurance, which is one of the easiest examples of risk sharing. You recognize that the cost of your funeral would be an unfair burden on others, so you want to purchase $10,000 in life insurance to help your loved ones out in the event that you die. The insurance company pools you together with people who have the same rough statistical chance of dying (using actuarial tables). Let’s say that those tables show that the chances of your death are 1 in 1,000 for any given year. This means that, in any given year, for every 1,000 people like you, the insurance company will pay out one policy. Now that they have the odds of payout, they have to calculate cost. Accounting for overhead, the insurance company will have to charge $12 in premiums to 1,000 people in order for $10,000 in coverage to be profitable for them. You are sharing the risk.

Now let’s assume that you are buying homeowner’s insurance in Florida. The company knows the chances of you having a fire, a flood, or a hurricane loss in any particular town. As we have seen with just the two examples (ISO and BCEGS), the insurance companies have REAMS of data that they use to calculate their odds of paying you. They then use their data to calculate the risk pool that your property falls into.

They use the ISO ratings of your area to determine the fire risk pool. They use the odds of a windstorm and the BCEGS rating of your community to determine the risk pool for natural hazards. They mitigate their exposure to liability due to criminal activity by excluding things like damage from police executing search warrants from coverage. Some natural disasters, like earthquakes, floods, landslides, and sinkholes, are often excluded from insurance coverage. (If there has been a sinkhole in the past 5 years that is within a mile of your house, no one will sell you a sinkhole policy) By the way, here is a listing of the ISO and BCEGS ratings (pdf warning) for all of Florida.

At the same time, the risk of a homeowner experiencing a theft are calculated, so are the risks of your dog biting someone, as well as every other risk they can think of. Even included is your credit score, because credit is a predictor of your likelihood of filing a claim versus just paying to fix it yourself. Poor people with bad credit are far more likely to file a claim than a well to do homeowner who doesn’t want his rates to rise for a small claim, so they just fix it themselves.

Each of these risk pools has its own set of risks and costs, and the insurance premiums are a reflection of that. Since each insurance company has its own set of criteria for predicting risk and loss, each company will have different rates. If you look closely at your policy, you will see that it doesn’t pay out for things like a terrorist attack, an act of war, a nuclear detonation, and any number of other things that the insurance company knows will result in too much risk.

If you don’t want to pay higher premiums because of hurricanes on the coast, you can always insure your house without hurricane coverage, called an x-wind policy, or just go without insurance. If your house is mortgaged though, good luck with that.

An x-wind policy is where the homeowner signs a paper declining coverage from windstorms. If the home has a mortgage or a lien, then the policyholder must also get a written statement from the lender or lienholder saying it approves the policyholder choosing to exclude windstorm coverage from the insurance policy. If you do choose to keep hurricane coverage, you will have to select what your hurricane deductible will be: $500, 2 percent, 5 percent, or 10 percent of the policy dwelling or structure limits. (some other restrictions apply- talk to your agent) Selecting higher deductibles means that you are assuming some of the risk for hurricane damage, which will result in lower premiums by placing you in a different risk pool. YMMV.

By Divemedic, ago

Stunned

I am stunned at the number of people reading this blog who think that those who are richer than they, or who choose to live differently than they should somehow be forced to comply with their own way of life.

I guess I shouldn’t be. People who claim to support “freedom” only want freedoms that they agree with. No different than people who only want free speech with which they agree.

So far this week, we have heard from people who want to eliminate fat people, people who own expensive homes, people who don’t eat like you, and other freedoms. All because they don’t like paying insurance.

Enjoy your soy and cricket dinners, hypocrites.

By Divemedic, ago

Silencing the Right

The attack on free speech by the FBI continues. The latest claim by the Feds is that the Russians have paid 2800 social media influencers to spread pro-Trump propaganda and influence the election. According to them, the propaganda includes:

  • Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color”
  • white middle-class people are being discriminated against

The claim is that the Russians are using AI and other tactics, and they have documents from the highest levels of the Russian government to prove it. So the FBI is seizing 32 web domains. This is how they are going to silence and neutralize the right’s pushback on social media. If you are pro-Trump, if you believe that we are being replaced by illegal immigrants, if you think that whites are being discriminated against, don’t believe your lying eyes- instead trust that the FBI is working to keep you safe from this dangerous Russian disinformation. Trust them, they love you and want to protect you from the double plus ungood thoughts that you are having.

Disappearances will begin shortly. It’s for their (and your) own good.

By Divemedic, ago

Disparity of Force

A large group of Amish Canadian Priests who were on their way to Bible Study decided to argue with a liquor store owner when one of them sucker punched the businessman in the face. Once that happened, the rest of the chimps decided to join in the group beating. That’s when the man produced a gun, which caused the entire group of them to collectively decide that they had other places to be. One of the little assholes filmed the encounter:

Police responded when shotspotter reported gunshots in the area, but Oakland police say no one was shot and nobody was arrested. Since the police and courts aren’t going to do shit, people will begin to take matters into their own hands. This video pissed me off just watching it. He would have been totally justified in shooting one of the assholes if he actually lived in America, but he lives in California. I would feel sorry for him, but he is likely a Democrat and voted for all of the diversity that he is currently experiencing.

By Divemedic, ago