explodingman

> The public policy motivation for liability insurance is to protect the lawsuit route.

A friend of mine had the same experience from the other side. She ran into some guy's car, apologised for her mistake and told him not to worry because she was fully covered. The first sign that something wasn't right was when a summons to appear at the magistrate's court appeared in the letter box.

She asked the insurance company what was going on and they said "just send the paper work to us and don't worry, we'll take care of it".

Then she got a knock on the door from a pair of court-appointed officers who were there to discuss her financial situation and assist her in arranging a payment plan to pay off her fine. Her insurance company had not sent a representative to the trial, so the magistrate found in favour of the only party that had turned up.

After some screaming on the phone, the insurance company paid the full amount of the judgement.

Any judge worth his salt will understand the global implications (courts clogged with litigants, inability of poor people to use cars) if insurance companies stonewall when their client is at fault, whatever the odd lot who comment in HN think. The judge should hit the other party.

Bear in mind that this is a matter of public interest and romwell has not signed an NDA. S/He should name that insurance company!

They are in company, not good company.

What atrocities?

Why doesn’t the back button work on your site?

The article points out failings of political/cultural elites as a way of casting doubt on the competence of scientific elites. The analogy is false,

The proposition that the vaccines are safe and effective, and predictions around Brexit or Trump, come from completely separate fields. The two "elites" in those two fields hardly ever overlap, use very different methods, have quite different histories and different internal cultures.

But the author did a very good job of it. Well written garbage.

> the question is how long can this strategy go on for.

Australia's strategy involves relaxing/reducing lockdowns when vaccination rates reach 70% and again at 80%. These levels are less ambitious than they seem because they don't count the 20% of the population under 16 years old.

Other thresholds are:

* when vaccines become available to anyone, which should be the case by December (Australia's vaccine roll out has been excruciatingly slow)

* the national budget anticipates opening up in the middle of 2022

My expectation is that the country will spend the first half of 2022 screaming and arm-twisting at the vaccine hesitant to get jabbed, and will then open up anyway on June 30.

What is the “1982 Exxon prediction” ?

The URL isn’t supported on outline.com and there’s no citation of the source article in the first few paragraphs. How do I read about it?

If you take a bit more risk driving, you get a bit more hazard to yourself and other road users. If you take a bit more risk with COVID-19, you get an epidemic with thousands of mainly elderly people dying in an overwhelmed medical system.

With COVID-19, the relationship between risk and hazard is nonlinear in a way that doesn't apply with most personal risk choices. Analogies with driving, climbing ladders, etc. are false.

Not for me, on either iOS or OSX.

The article site disables "back" function in the browser. You'll want to open this one in a separate tab.

is there any way to disable browser compliance with websites that pull this stunt?

Dark pattern ahead. The cookie notice has a checkbox (unchecked by default) saying "Do not sell my personal information".

The steady eclipse of traditional media by Big Tech services has led the USA to a situation where a significant minority actually believe that Trump is a sort of superhero saving the world from pedophiles (QAnon) and a larger minority who really think the Democrat party somehow stole the recent presidential election, and that storming the Capitol is a reasonable response. The view from Down Under is that we need to avoid such civic disasters and propping up the traditional media is an essential part of that.

Like most people, I'm astonished at how social media mediated news seems to disable so many people's bullshit detectors, but there's no denying that it is so.

Anyone who wants to persuade Australians that their government should not go ahead with the planned regulation of FB and Google needs to come up with an alternative suggestion that would keep Australia's democracy functional. I can't see anything in the anti-regulation commentary on HN that passes this test.

Non-paywalled link to summary of article: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/overweight-and-healthy-is...

In the study, the bottom group by activity contains 63% of the population, while the bottom group by obesity contains only 18% of the population. So shifting from bottom to middle by obesity is a bigger move than shifting from bottom to middle by activity level. Not sure the author is comparing apples with apples here.

In reality, we need to be aware of what lifestyle changes we can sustainably make given our particular circumstances, whatever the whole-population results might look like. To quote the author, “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles".

Apple can monetise user data by keeping it private and offering privacy as a feature to drive hardware sales/margins.

I don't know for sure if this is their business model. I think it is, and it makes sense as a strategy.

Discussion [1] indicates that the control group were energised into exercising about as much as the "moderate" (not HIIT) intervention group. This is not an uncommon problem in intervention trials in this area.

Something is better than nothing. More is better than less.

[1] (audio and transcript) https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/healthreport/m...