PurestGuava

Given that mom isn't going to understand any of the prompt, and presumably has no pressing care or need for encrypting an email, the sensible default would be to send email unencrypted unless she expressly asks otherwise.

It is pretty interesting seeing the various different design philosophies for computer UIs compete in this thread:

the typical Linux approach (ask the user a convoluted question, expect them to understand it and expect an informed response - if/when the user selects wrong, tough shit)

the Windows approach (ask a convoluted question but give an out for the 99% of people who don't understand it - if the user still selects wrong, tough shit)

the Apple approach (don't ask the question at all and choose a sensible default, because 99% won't care - 99% of users get the exact result they wanted to begin with)

In the UK, car insurance companies have actually been loss-making recently, despite car insurance being mandatory. It's not a guarantee of profit, especially not given how hyper-competitive the car insurance market is here.

An insurance mutual's goal is still revenue. Your own link spells it out - it still tries to make a profit, it's just that whatever profit arises gets redistributed to policy holders or others. It still has to respond to commercial pressures and the need to run a sustainable business in the same way as any firm.

It's a common misconception that co-operatives/mutuals somehow don't need to make money or will actively try to not make money, but in reality if they don't they tend to die fairly quickly.

Commercial insurances will also often pay for risk improvement works and assessments for their customers' businesses on the basis that it will reduce the incidences of claims and/or reduce the cost of claims if they do arise.

> At the risk of getting political, (governmental) healthcare is another one, where regular checkups can save you thousands in repair. It might look like a subsidy but in the end it becomes a net-benefit for everyone in the pool.

This is part of the theory behind the Affordable Care Act and its subsidies, in that the more people who have health insurance, the bigger and more diverse the pool, it becomes a win-win-win for insurers (bigger pool = good, more money, more customers, more profit) consumers (health insurance = healthier, better life) and the government and country overall (healthy population = better long term prospects for the country).

Of course, true universal healthcare programmes like the NHS simply abstract that away by removing the profit incentive entirely, cutting the insurers out of the equation and turning it into a more straightforward "the government pays for healthcare because a sick population is just a plain bad thing". It's as such not really a "risk pool" or "insurance" in any real sense, because the amount you pay into the system is completely disconnected from your risk of drawing out of it (and indeed, given the correlation of poor health and low income, likely inversely proportional).

That argument is silly because it misunderstands what "risk" means both in an insurance context and in general.

Yes, if you could 100% guarantee that someone was going to have a $Y valued claim, their premium would fairly be 100% of $Y at least in order to allow for their contribution to the risk pool. Problem is, you cannot 100% predict the future, and there is no model capable of doing so, nor will there likely ever be. Nor can you predict that any other insured risk might not materialise in the meantime.

More to the point, it fundamentally misunderstands what insurance is and how it works, not least the commercial considerations involved. If there is a 100% risk of risk X materialising, the insurer won't rate your premium at the cost of risk X; it will simply exclude risk X from your policy and rate your premium based on all the other myriad risks that might arise that year in an attempt to win your business and collect premium for what, to them, is a better bet.

This already happens, incidentally; travel insurance policies will exclude pre-existing conditions or recurrences of previous illnesses as a matter of course, because if someone (e.g.) has cancer, the odds of them needing to claim on their policy - and as such draw down from the pool more than they paid in premium - skyrocket.