“
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?
”
”
Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting)
“
Insurance is important in business. It just makes sense that we share risk for low probability high impact events.
”
”
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity.
”
”
Isadora Duncan (My Life)
“
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?
”
”
John Hodge (Trainspotting: A Screenplay (Based on the Novel by Irvine Welsh))
“
Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . .
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
“
the top causes of stress in the U.S. have been identified by scientists at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a major study. They are “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.
”
”
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
“
if a bank failed to meet its quota for loans to low-income minorities, it ran a high risk of failing to earn a “satisfactory” CRA rating from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
”
”
John Perazzo (Goverment versus The People)
“
If you’re not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you’re held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write copy for an ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?
”
”
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable. In 2008 19,045 children age five and under were prescribed antipsychotics through Medicaid.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Feeling Faint Issue: I’m happy losing weight with a low carbohydrate diet, but I’m always tired, get light headed when I stand up, and if I exercise for more than 10 minutes I feel like I’m going to pass out. Response: Congratulations on your weight loss success, and with just a small adjustment to your diet, you can say goodbye to your weakness and fatigue. The solution is salt…a bit more salt to be specific. This may sound like we’re crazy when many experts argue that we should all eat less salt, however these are the same experts who tell us that eating lots of carbohydrates and sugar is OK. But what they don’t tell you is that your body functions very differently when you are keto-adapted. When you restrict carbs for a week or two, your kidneys switch from retaining salt to rapidly excreting it, along with a fair amount of stored water. This salt and water loss explains why many people experience rapid weight loss in the first couple of weeks on a low carbohydrate diet. Ridding your body of this excess salt and water is a good thing, but only up to a point. After that, if you don’t replace some of the ongoing sodium excretion, the associated water loss can compromise your circulation The end result is lightheadedness when you stand up quickly or fatigue if you exercise enough to get ‘warmed up’. Other common side effects of carbohydrate restriction that go away with a pinch of added salt include headache and constipation; and over the long term it also helps the body maintain its muscles. The best solution is to include 1 or 2 cups of bouillon or broth in your daily schedule. This adds only 1-2 grams of sodium to your daily intake, and your ketoadapted metabolism insures that you pass it right on through within a matter of hours (allaying any fears you might have of salt buildup in your system). This rapid clearance also means that on days that you exercise, take one dose of broth or bouillon within the hour before you start.
”
”
Jeff S. Volek (The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living: An Expert Guide to Making the Life-Saving Benefits of Carbohydrate Restriction Sustainable and Enjoyable)
“
That was the main thing wrong with Mrs. Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren't being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed's potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn't being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn't have a 'proper job' and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an 'impossible city,' to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the food Rohinka had cooked.
”
”
John Lanchester (Capital)
“
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you. If you’re not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you’re held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write copy for an ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?
”
”
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
They had done the hard, immediate work of shock and grief so deep they drowned and the awful, unfair work of insurance paperwork and canceling mail and credit cards and magazine subscriptions. Then they had done the work of grief as tide, receding until the ground seemed almost dry, then rushing back in, foamy and cold. Now they were in the forever part, the endless low-level blue that had become a presence more than an absence. It was the ocean they swam in or the ocean that sloshed
”
”
Ramona Ausubel (The Last Animal)
“
Munger replied: People are always saying to Berkshire, 'Gee, why don't you write a lot more volume in relation to capital? Everyone else is doing it. The rating agencies say that you can write twice as much in annual volume as you have capital.' And they look at our $10 billion in insurance capital and say, 'That's $20 billion a year. What are you doing writing only $1 billion?' But then . . . somebody else comes in and asks, 'Why did everybody get killed last year but you?' Maybe the questions are related.
”
”
Janet Lowe (Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger)
“
To an economist, the strategy is obvious. Since even a penny is more valuable than nothing, it makes sense for Zelda to accept an offer as low as a penny—and, therefore, it makes sense for Annika to offer just a penny, keeping $19.99 for herself. But, economists be damned, that’s not how normal people played the game. The Zeldas usually rejected offers below $3. They were apparently so disgusted by a lowball offer that they were willing to pay to express their disgust. Not that lowball offers happened very often. On average, the Annikas offered the Zeldas more than $6. Given how the game works, an offer this large was clearly meant to ward off rejection. But still, an average of $6—almost a third of the total amount—seemed pretty generous. Does that make it altruism? Maybe, but probably not. The Ultimatum player making the offer has something to gain—the avoidance of rejection—by giving more generously. As often happens in the real world, seemingly kind behaviors in Ultimatum are inextricably tied in with potentially selfish motivations.
”
”
Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
“
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?
”
”
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
“
The truth is that I'm a bad person. But, that's gonna change - I'm going to change. This is the last of that sort of thing. Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.
”
”
Irvine Welsh
“
The painful fact that the poor end up paying more than the rich for many goods and services has a very simple and systemic explanation. It generally costs more to provide goods and services in low-income neighborhoods. For example, insurance and security costs are often higher in poor neighborhoods due to high crime and vandalism rates. This is a factor frequently forgotten by those who look to personal intentions for an explanation for this phenomenon. For example, a shopping center within a populous neighborhood of a midtown city spent 15 percent more on security guards and night lighting than a shopping complex within a residential area of the same city. All these costs are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
“
In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent).
Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.
”
”
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
“
Inefficiency. A centralized financial system has many inefficiencies. Perhaps the most egregious example is the credit card interchange rate that causes consumers and small businesses to lose up to 3 percent of a transaction's value with every swipe due to the payment network oligopoly's pricing power. Remittance fees are 5–7 percent. Time is also wasted in the two days it takes to “settle” a stock transaction (officially transfer ownership). In the Internet age, this seems utterly implausible. Other inefficiencies include costly (and slow) transfer of funds, direct and indirect brokerage fees, lack of security, and the inability to conduct microtransactions, many of which are not obvious to users. In the current banking system, deposit interest rates remain very low and loan rates high because banks need to cover their brick-and-mortar costs. The insurance industry provides another example.
”
”
Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
“
DECALOGUE, n. A series of commandments, ten in number—just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice. Following is the revised edition of the Decalogue, calculated for this meridian. Thou shalt no God but me adore:
'Twere too expensive to have more.
No images nor idols make
For Robert Ingersoll to break.
Take not God's name in vain; select
A time when it will have effect.
Work not on Sabbath days at all,
But go to see the teams play ball.
Honor thy parents. That creates
For life insurance lower rates.
Kill not, abet not those who kill;
Thou shalt not pay thy butcher's bill.
Kiss not thy neighbor's wife, unless
Thine own thy neighbor doth caress
Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete
Successfully in business. Cheat.
Bear not false witness—that is low—
But "hear 'tis rumored so and so."
Cover thou naught that thou hast not
By hook or crook, or somehow, got.
”
”
Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
“
Parents like Jennifer, Susan, and Rae express desires that are quite modest. Full-time hours come first. That is a prize that can be astonishingly hard to wrest from a low-wage employer who wants to avoid added costs associated with full-time employment, such as health insurance and paid time off. A predictable schedule, so parents can arrange for safe, reliable child care, comes next. A few say they would be happy if they could get just those two things. Yet finding a job with even those basic attributes is something Susan Brown feels she can only dream of, not expect. Most parents, like Jennifer and Rae, hope for a little more. If they could just make $12 or $13 per hour, they say, they could make it; $15 per hour is really shooting the moon. Safe working conditions, and some sick or personal days, would be a real plus. The other “extras” that once came routinely with a full-time job—health insurance, vacation days, and retirement benefits—don’t often come up in conversations with the $2-a-day poor. These perks are so uncommon among the jobs available to low-wage workers that they seem all but outside the bounds of reality.
”
”
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
“
Believe me," Dr. Tamalet summed up, "if you wanted that operation in France, you could get it"
Which is, of course, the boon and the bane of France's health care system. It offers a maximum of free choice among skillful doctors and well-equipped hospitals, with little or not waiting, at bargain-basement prices [in out-of-pocket terms to the consumer]. It's a system that enables the French to live longer and healthier lives, with zero risk of financial loss due to illness. But somebody has to pay for all that high-quality, ready-when-you-need-it care--and the patients, so far, have not been willing to do so. As a result, the major health insurance funds are all operating at a deficit, and the costs of the health care system are increasing significantly faster than the economy as a whole. That's why the doctors keep striking and the sickness funds keep negotiating and the government keeps going back to the drawing board, with a new 'major health care reform' every few years. So far, the saving grace for France's system has been the high level of efficiency, as exemplified by the 'carte vitale,' that keeps administrative costs low--much lower than in the United States.
”
”
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
“
If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day— doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents— it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of “independents” and “moderates” may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.
”
”
William E. Connolly (The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism)
“
Smart Sexy Money is About Your Money
As an accomplished entrepreneur with a history that spans more than fourteen years, Annette Wise is constantly looking for ways to give back to her community. Using enterprising efforts, she qualified for $125,000 in startup funding to develop a specialized residential facility that allows developmentally disabled adults to live in the community after almost a lifetime of living in a state institution.
In doing so, she has provided steady employment in her community for the last thirteen years. After dedicating years to her residential facility, Annette began to see clearly the difficulty business owners face in planning for retirement successfully.
Searching high and low to find answers, she took control of financial uncertainty and in less than 2 years, she became a Full Life Agent, licensed Registered Representative, Investment Advisor Representative and Limited Principal.
Her focus is on building an extensive list of clients that depend on her for smart retirement guidance, thorough college planning, detailed business continuation, and business exit strategies.
Clients have come to rely on Annette for insight on tax advantaged savings and retirement options.
Annette’s primary goal is to help her clients understand more than just concepts, but to easily understand how money works, the consequences of their decisions and how they work in conjunction with their desires and goal.
Ever the curious soul who is always up for a challenge, Annette is routinely resourceful at finding sensible means to a sometimes-challenging end. She believes in infinite possibilities as well as in sharing her knowledge with others. She is the go-to source for “Smart Wealth Solutions.”
Among Annette’s proudest accomplishments are her two wonderful sons, Michael III and Matthew. As a single mom, they have been her inspiration and joy. She is forever grateful to the greatest brothers in the world- Andrew and Anthony Wise, for assistance in grooming them into amazing young men.
”
”
Annette Wise
“
MATHEMATICAL MIRACLE Some years ago, I heard a story which has been making the rounds in Midwest A.A. circles for years. I don’t have any names to back up this story, but I have heard it from many sources, and the circumstances sound believable. A man in a small Wisconsin city had been on the program for about three years and had enjoyed contented sobriety through that period. Then bad luck began to hit him in bunches. The firm for which he had worked for some fifteen years was sold; his particular job was phased out of existence, and the plant moved to another city. For several months, he struggled along at odd jobs while looking for a company that needed his specialized experience. Then another blow hit him. His wife was forced to enter a hospital for major surgery, and his company insurance had expired. At this point he cracked, and decided to go on an all-out binge. He didn’t want to stage this in the small city, where everyone knew his sobriety record. So he went to Chicago, checked in at a North Side hotel, and set forth on his project. It was Friday night, and the bars were filled with a swinging crowd. But he was in no mood for swinging—he just wanted to get quietly, miserably drunk. Finally, he found a basement bar on a quiet side street, practically deserted. He sat down on a bar stool and ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. The bartender said, “Yes, sir,” and reached for a bottle. Then the bartender stopped in his tracks, took a long, hard look at the customer, leaned over the bar, and said in a low tone, “I was in Milwaukee about four months ago, and one night I attended an open meeting. You were on the speaking platform, and you gave one of the finest A.A. talks I ever heard.” The bartender turned and walked to the end of the bar. For a few minutes, the customer sat there—probably in a state of shock. Then he picked his money off the bar with trembling hands and walked out, all desire for a drink drained out of him. It is estimated that there are about 8,000 saloons in Chicago, employing some 25,000 bartenders. This man had entered the one saloon in 8,000 where he would encounter the one man in 25,000 who knew that he was a member of A.A. and didn’t belong there. Chicago, Illinois
”
”
Alcoholics Anonymous (Came to Believe)
“
[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance.
Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it.
Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.
”
”
Torben Iversen (Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics))
“
By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement.
During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk.
For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe.
The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became.
Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations.
Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.
”
”
Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
“
It has been estimated by industry insiders in the US that relying on independent contractors rather than employees can lower direct business costs for companies by as much as 25 per cent. At least some of those costs are being offloaded onto the state, and by extension onto taxpayers and other workers. Due to the paucity of many people's earnings in the 'gig' economy, signing on for social security when you fall ill is sometimes the only option. Thus the taxpayer is essentially out of pocket twice over – first as employer national insurance contributions fall, and secondly as this casual workforce turn to the state to survive.
”
”
James Bloodworth (Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain)
“
Keynes had been appointed to the board of the National Mutual, one of the oldest institutions in the city, in 1919.107 He had served as chairman of the insurer, and helped manage its investment portfolio from 1921. That portfolio lost £641,000 ($61 million), an enormous sum of money in 1937. While Keynes was recuperating from a heart attack, F. N. Curzon, the acting chairman of the insurer called him to account for the loss.108 Curzon and the board criticized Keynes’s investment policy of remaining invested in his “pet” stocks during the decline.109 In a response to Curzon in March 1938, Keynes wrote:110 1. I do not believe that selling at very low prices is a remedy for having failed to sell at high ones. . . . As soon as prices had fallen below a reasonable estimate of intrinsic value and long-period probabilities, there was nothing more to be done. It was too late to remedy any defects in previous policy, and the right course was to stand pretty well where one was. 2. I feel no shame at being found owning a share when the bottom of the market comes. I do not think it is the business, far less the duty, for an institutional or any other serious investor to be constantly considering whether he should cut and run on a falling market, or to feel himself open to blame if shares depreciate on his hands. . . . An investor is aiming, or should be aiming, primarily at long-period results, and should be solely judged by these. . . . The idea that we should all be selling out to the other fellow and should all be finding ourselves with nothing but cash at the bottom of the market is not merely fantastic, but destructive of the whole system. 3. I do not feel that we have in fact done particularly badly. . . . If we deal in equities; it is inevitable that there should be large fluctuations.
”
”
Allen C. Benello (Concentrated Investing: Strategies of the World's Greatest Concentrated Value Investors)
“
Never rent a limo without obtaining a valid and current certificate of liability insurance prior to pick up. If you fail in this endeavor, you are placing the lives of your group in danger. If they cannot produce proof of insurance, do not even think about it no matter how low the investment was!
”
”
Craig Speck (The Ultimate Common Sense Ground Transportation Guide For Churches and Schools: How To Learn Not To Crash and Burn)
“
NOTE The following comparisons are based on delivering an industry standard of 90 grams of EDTA. EDTA ORAL PILLS & CAPSULES (NOT RECOMMENDED) Less expensive than IV, suppositories, or oral liquid but has a low absorption rate of 5% to 18%. Needs a much longer time measured in years to complete 90 grams delivered. This method is NOT covered by Medicare or private insurance plans.
”
”
Christopher David Allen (Reverse Heart Disease: Heart Attack Cure & Stroke Cure)
“
ORAL LIQUID EDTA (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BEST CHOICE) This superior method offers a low cost of $129.95. It has a high absorption rate of up to 98% and can be as quick as 4-weeks to deliver 90 grams. This method is by far the fastest choice to remove arterial blockages. It is easily done at home by adding the liquid EDTA to distilled water and drinking five to six times per day. Oral liquid EDTA is NOT covered by Medicare, or private insurance.
”
”
Christopher David Allen (Reverse Heart Disease: Heart Attack Cure & Stroke Cure)
“
First, A ship of the finest make and model available shall be furnished to carry the constructors home.
2nd, The said ship shall be laden with various cargo as here specified: diamonds—four bushels, gold coin—forty bushels, platinum, palladium, and whatever other ready valuables they happen to think of—eight bushels of each, also whatever mementos and tokens from the Royal Apartments the signatories of this instrument may deem appropriate.
3rd, Until such time as the said ship shall be in readiness for takeoff, every nut and bolt in place, fully loaded and delivered up to the constructors complete with red carpet, an eighty-piece send-off band and children's chorus, an abundance of honors, decorations and awards, and a wildly cheering crowd—until then, no King.
4th, That a formal expression of undying gratitude shall be stamped upon a gold medallion and addressed to Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors Trurl and Klapaucius, Delight and Terror of the Universe, and moreover it shall contain a full account of their victory and be duly signed and notarized by every high and low official in the land, then set in the richly embellished barrel of the King's favorite cannon, which Lord Protozor, Master of the Royal Hunt, shall himself and wholly unaided carry on board—no other Protozor but the one who lured Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors to this planet thinking to work their painful and ignominious death thereby.
5th, That the aforesaid Protozor shall accompany them on their return journey as insurance against any sort of double-dealing, pursuit, and the like. On board he shall occupy a cage three by three by four feet and shall receive a a daily allowance of humble pie with a filling made of that very same sawdust which Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors saw fit to order in the process of indulging the King's foolishness and which was subsequently taken to police headquarters by unmarked balloon.
6th and lastly, The King need not crave forgiveness of Their Most Sublime and Radiant Constructors on bended knee, since he is much too beneath them to deserve notice.
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
“
For example, in the 1960s, credit card companies, which host the two-sided merchant and cardholder platform, resisted insuring cardholders against fraud on their cards. They argued that insurance would promote fraud as consumers would become careless with their cards, and that banks forced to absorb more risk would become more reluctant to extend credit, hurting low-income consumers. Over the vigorous objections of major banks, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (1970) and a subsequent amendment required fraud insurance, imposing a limit of $50 on consumer liability for fraudulent use of a credit card. The disaster predicted by the credit card companies did not occur. Freed from the fear of fraud, consumers used their cards so much more often that the increase in interaction volume more than offset the increase in fraud. The business benefit from fraud insurance is so powerful that, in order to encourage adoption and use, many banks now waive the $50 charge if consumers report a lost or stolen card within twenty-four hours.45
”
”
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
“
We need real health care reform. But it should expand competition and empower patients, and disempower government bureaucrats from getting between us and our doctors. We should allow people to purchase insurance across state lines (which is currently illegal), which will in turn create a fifty-state national marketplace for low-cost catastrophic coverage. If you want more coverage, you want more choices and lower costs. Obamacare gives us fewer choices and higher costs.
”
”
Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
“
Are millions of Americans out of work? Yes. Are millions of Americans struggling? Yes. Are millions of Americans seeing their health insurance premiums skyrocket? Yes. Are millions of Americans at risk of losing their health insurance because of ObamaCare? Yes. But Washington tells our constituents: No, no, never mind. It can't be done. It cannot be done. It is impossible. The rules of Washington say this cannot be done. And we wonder why this body has such low approval among the people. When we go out and tell the American people it cannot be done, there is nothing that can be done to stop ObamaCare, what we are saying is we are not willing to do it. We are not willing to stand and fight. We
”
”
Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
“
There had been seventy-five straight months of job growth under President Obama, and incomes for the bottom 80 percent were finally starting to go up. Twenty million more people had health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the greatest legislative achievement of the outgoing administration. Crime was still at historic lows. Our military remained by far the most powerful in the world. These are knowable, verifiable facts. Trump stood up there in front of the world and said the exact opposite—just as he had throughout the campaign. He didn’t seem to see or value any of the energy and optimism I saw when I traveled around the country. Listening to Trump, it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore. It still feels that way.
”
”
Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
“
In another cost control measure, it became mandatory in 2008 for employers to purchase medical insurance for low-income foreign workers, such as construction workers and maids.
”
”
William A. Haseltine (Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Healthcare Story)
“
Free Auto Insurance Quotes
1 844-833-1088 - Call now
Otto could save you over $100/month. Apply for all the insurance discounts. Fast and free. Get full coverage for way cheaper. Save over $100/month with rates as low as $19/month.
”
”
Auto Insurance Quotes
“
On top of the potential for restructuring the business, there are significant bloated costs to trim. General Insurance is paying for expensive sponsorship deals with sports teams that offer little benefit. It needlessly maintains two Gulfstream private jets. Some managers work four days a week because their workloads are perennially light. Bonus plans have targets that are far too easy to meet. Pensions are inexplicably overfunded, and the company’s contributions to pension programs can be scaled back to the lower end of targets set by regulators. The IT department is overstaffed and full of pet projects that the business will never realize value from. Low-grade IT can be outsourced to Asia.
”
”
Sachin Khajuria (Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win)
“
Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Anger provides the No. 1 difference between a fist-fight and a boxing bout. Anger is an unwelcome guest in any department of boxing. From the first time a chap draws on gloves as a beginner, he is taught to "keep his temper"-never to "lose his head." When a boxer gives way to anger, he becomes a "natural" fighter who tosses science into the bucket. When that occurs in the amateur or professional ring, the lost-head fighter leaves himself open and becomes an easy target for a sharpshooting opponent. Because an angry fighter usually is a helpless fighter in the ring, many prominent professionals-like Abe Attell and the late Kid McCoy- tried to taunt fiery opponents into losing their heads and "opening up." Anger rarely flares in a boxing match. Different, indeed, is the mental condition governing a fist-fight. In that brand of combat, anger invariably is the fuel propelling one or both contestants. And when an angry, berserk chap is whaling away in a fist-fight, he usually forgets all about rules-if he ever knew any.
That brings us to difference No. 2: THE REFEREE ENFORCES THE RULES IN A BOXING MATCH; BUT THERE ARE NO OFFICIALS AT A FIST-FIGHT. Since a fist-fight has no supervision, it can develop into a roughhouse affair in which anything goes. There's no one to prevent low blows, butting, kicking, eye-gouging, biting and strangling. When angry fighters fall into a clinch, there's no one to separate them. Wrestling often ensues. A fellow may be thrown to earth, floor, or pavement. He can be hammered when down, or even be "given the boots"- kicked in the faceunless some humane bystander interferes. And you can't count on bystanders. A third difference is this: A FIST-FIGHT IS NOT PRECEDED BY MATCHMAKING. In boxing, matches are made according to weights and comparative abilities. For example, if you're an amateur or professional lightweight boxer, you'll probably be paired off against a chap of approximately your poundage-one who weighs between 126 and 135 pounds. And you'll generally be matched with a fellow whose ability is rated about on a par with your own, to insure an interesting bout and to prevent injury to either. If you boast only nine professional fights, there's little danger of your being tossed in with a top-flighter or a champion.
”
”
Jack Dempsey (Toledo arts: championship fighting and agressive defence (Martial arts))
“
The losers, according to the Times: “People Buying Health Insurance,” “Individual Taxpayers in the Future,” “The Elderly,” “Low-Income Families,” and people in high-income, highly taxed states like California and New York. “In the long run, most Americans will see no tax cut or a tax hike,” the Washington Post wrote in its own analysis.38 The final loser was the US Treasury, and government itself: by the end of the fiscal year in which the bill went into effect, the deficit had grown to $779 billion.39
”
”
Andrea Bernstein (American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power)
“
Interestingly, Freeman describes a set of circumstances in which the unstructured group can, in fact, work: It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity. It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a “common language” for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others’ experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other’s behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, they can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise. There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily. There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts. Here
”
”
Camille Fournier (The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change)
“
My Choice Health Insurance is a black-owned health insurance agency in New Orleans that specializes in helping the underserved black community in New Orleans to obtain affordable health insurance through the ACA Marketplace (Affordable Care Act) also known as Obamacare. We are dedicated to empower individual and black families to make sure they are educated, supported, and provided all the resources to help them take advantage of free or low-cost Obamacare health insurance plans.
”
”
My Choice Health Insurance New Orleans
“
In insurance, for example, USAA has been a stellar performer with a value proposition aimed at low-risk customers. Here’s what is essential: finding a unique way to serve your chosen segment profitably.
”
”
Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
“
Unknown to most people, much of the gold that had supposedly flown into France as actually sitting in London. Bullion was so heavy - a seventeen-inch cube weighs about a ton - that instead of shipping crates of it across hundreds of miles from one country to another and paying high insurance, central banks had taken to "earmarking" the metal, that is, keeping it in the same vault but simply re-registering its ownership. Thus the decline in Britain's gold reserves and their accumulation in France and the United States was accomplished by a group of men descending into the vaults of the Bank of England, loading some bars of bullion onto a low wooden truck with small rubber tires, trundling them thirty feet across the room to the other wall, and offloading them, though not before attaching some white name tags indicating that the gold now belonged to the Banque de France or the Federal Reserve Bank. That the world was being subject to a progressively tightening squeeze on credit just because there happened to be too much gold on one side of the vault and not enough on the other provoked Lord d'Abrenon, Britain's ambassador to Germany after the war and now an elder statesmen-economist, to exclaim, "This depression is the stupidest and most gratuitous in history.
”
”
Liaquat Ahamed (Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World)
“
Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3.
”
”
Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
“
Consider the amount of money left on the table by low-income workers who don’t apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Roughly 7 million people who could receive the credit don’t claim it, collectively passing up $17.3 billion annually. Combine that with the amount of money unclaimed each year by people who deny themselves food stamps ($13.4 billion), government health insurance ($62.2 billion), unemployment insurance when between jobs ($9.9 billion), and Supplemental Security Income ($38.9 billion), and you are already up to nearly $142 billion in unused aid.[19]
”
”
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
“
Science Fiction. I have sold thirteen stories, two of which have not yet been published and none of which are any damn good. I have sold to Universe, Original, Future, Super, Analog, Amazing, If, and Galaxy. A fourteenth story was sold to Fantastic Universe, which proceeded to drop dead before they could publish it. Both John Campbell and Cele Goldsmith have asked me to write sequels to novelettes of mine they had bought (I haven’t written either, and won’t). In a desk drawer I have twenty-odd thousand words of a science fiction novel, which is good, but which I’m not going to finish because it isn’t worth my while. Avalon pays three hundred and fifty dollars for a book, and I wouldn’t support such piracy either by writing for them or buying their wares. John Campbell isn’t the hero, so it can’t be serialized in Analog. If finished, it would run a lot longer than forty-five thousand words, so that leaves out Ace. There’s no gratuitous sex, so that excludes Galaxy/Beacon (or would if they were still being published). It isn’t a silly satire about a world controlled by advertising agencies or insurance companies or the A&P, so it can’t be serialized in Galaxy Magazine. It’s in sensible English, so Amazing is out. It isn’t about the horrors of Atomic War, so no mainstream hardcover house would look twice at it. I’d like to write it anyway for my own amusement (you know, like a real writer-type), but unpublished manuscripts unfortunately have a low enjoyment quota, at least for me. So the hell with it.
”
”
Donald E. Westlake (The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany)
“
But voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass eighty-four new laws to put the Great Society into place. They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community-development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over age sixty-five, and Medicaid, which helped cover health care costs for those with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
”
”
Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
“
Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3. In other words, the headlines during the summer of 2001 might just as easily have read “Shark Attacks About Average This Year.” But that probably wouldn’t have sold many magazines.
”
”
Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
“
Government inflation-protected securities (in the United States, these are Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS) A low-cost total U.S. domestic equity (stock) index fund, either a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund (ETF—i.e., a sort of mutual fund that can be traded like stocks on an exchange) A low-cost total international equity index fund, either a mutual fund or an ETF Single-premium income annuities Low-cost term life insurance
”
”
Michael Edesess (The 3 Simple Rules of Investing: Why Everything You've Heard About Investing Is Wrong—and What to Do Instead)
“
The Black Church has no challenger as the cultural womb of the black community. Not only did it give birth to new institutions such as schools, banks, insurance companies, and low income housing, it also provided an academy and an arena for political activities, and it nurtured young talent for musical, dramatic, and artistic development.
”
”
C. Eric Lincoln (The Black Church in the African American Experience)
“
Of more angst to drivers are the customer ratings systems imposed by the app companies. While most drivers do not have a problem with the notion of being rated, they are concerned that they will receive poor marks for circumstances beyond their control. Customers can give even the most earnest drivers bad ratings for any reason such as bumpy rides over pothole strewn roads, traffic congestion and passengers underestimating how much time they need to reach their destinations. Miscommunication between passengers and drivers can occur because passengers cannot speak the local language, are drunk, or fall asleep and cannot direct the driver to their remote destinations. Perhaps some passengers just do not like the ethnic group to which some drivers appear to belong. Circumstances such as these are clearly the fault of passengers who may rate drivers poorly nonetheless.
Drivers with low ratings can be expelled from on-demand taxi services. This unfairness is compounded to the extent that drivers make large investments in their cars, insurance and fuel. Making drivers, who basically invested in a franchise, vulnerable to expulsion from a system because of unfair ratings seems to me to be a potential source of dissention or even litigation.
Another concern associated with the taxi app business model is that drivers only have 15 seconds to respond to notices of pick up opportunities. Drivers that fail to respond in such tight windows lose the business. Repeat failures to make timely responses can result in temporary suspensions. This pressure, and related distractions associated with interacting with handsets, is applied simultaneously with all of the challenges of navigating traffic in a variety of weather conditions. Foremost, this is a driving hazard that imperils everyone in the vicinity. It also ties in with the ratings systems because drivers are only rated on the rides they complete. Drivers who claim rides but abandon the customer if it looks like the pickup will be delayed have no ratings risk. Paradoxically, no ratings result in the worst customer service as passengers end up stranded.
”
”
David Wanetick (Business Model Validation)
“
Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi agrees. He identifies a range of social policies that would be vital to promoting greater socioeconomic equality—and hence, better health. “Make an investment in education, for example, to give people a decent start in life,” he says. “We can subsidize childcare, which is a major stress for low-income mothers, especially those who are single parents. We can expand unemployment insurance and expand access to health care. This is controversial only in the United States. Other societies view health care as a basic human right.
”
”
Jeremy A. Smith (Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology)
“
[In] NIVO 1, LLC v. Antunez, 217 Cal.App.4th Supp. 1 (2013) The Appellate Division of the Los Angeles Superior Court held that a tenant may not be evicted for failure to buy renter's insurance even if the lease requires purchasing insurance.
”
”
Madeline Howard (California Eviction Defense: Protecting Low-Income Tenants 2014)
“
This was his first trip on the Ossifar Distana, his first real splash in life. Look what it got him. Mister Smiff liked anonymity. He kept a low profile, often traveling under assumed names, claiming to be anything from a banker to a (very) successful life insurance salesman. He’d never broken the law, at least not irreparably. He was quite generous, well liked, sponsoring many charities anonymously – which is why it was so surprising to find him floating face down in the private spa in his apartment, murdered. He had been murdered, unless it was a freak shaving accident. Those old razors weren’t called cut-throats for nothing. Yikes.
”
”
Christina Engela (Dead Man's Hammer)
“
Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea said of Sanders’s Medicare-for-all health care plan. “I don’t want to empower Republican governors to take away Medicaid, to take away health insurance for low-income and middle-income working Americans. And I think very much that’s what Senator Sanders’ plan would do.
”
”
Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
“
There are no ready-to-use modules with RPA. Most of the development is bespoke, and all process flows need to be built almost from scratch. The connections also need to be constructed. This results in a more flexible design and implementation of the programs developed, which can fit with more specific business requirements. The key advantage of RPA is that it allows the creation of automation programs that can involve legacy systems (e.g., those which can’t use APIs) or address non-standard requirements (e.g., onboarding of clients for a broker insurance company under Singapore regulations). However, with RPA, the lack of native integration amongst the components has weaknesses. For example, it involves less robustness, weaker data integrity, and lower resilience to process changes. If one part of an RPA program fails, the whole end-to-end process is stopped. As an outcome, based on our experience, the leading practice is to use low-code and smart workflow platforms as a foundation of the overall automation platform. In contrast, RPA is used for any integration of the overall platform with legacy systems or for automation of bespoke processes.
”
”
Pascal Bornet (INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human)
“
The biggest problem that we now collectively face is that for many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments, their incomes are low in relation to their expenses, and their debts and other liabilities (such as those for pensions, healthcare, and insurance) are very large relative to the value of their assets. It may not seem that way—in fact, it often seems the opposite—because there are many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments that look rich even while they are in the process of going broke.
”
”
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
“
But the new century brought a ‘New Liberalism’, which saw social improvement as something which the state should deliberately direct. The President of the Board of Trade took this up with the zeal of a convert, proposing a minimum wage, creating labour exchanges to find work for the unemployed, suppressing ‘sweat shops’ – small garment factories where men, and often women, many of them immigrants, worked very long hours for very low wages – and then helping Lloyd George, who had been promoted as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to introduce National Insurance and an old age pension.
”
”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft (Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill)
“
Concierge Medical Practice located in the heart of Cancun's beautiful Hotel Zone. Our doctors are available 24/7 for all your healthcare needs. We can visit your hotel/home/office or see you by Telemedicine. All for the same low price. No Insurance Required.
”
”
MexiMDcom Concierge Medicine
“
Telemed Cancun is located in the heart of Cancun's beautiful Hotel Zone. Our doctors are available 24/7 for all your healthcare needs. We can visit your hotel/home/office or see you by Telemedicine. All for the same low price. No Insurance Required.
”
”
Telemed Cancun
“
Act as if every broker, insurance salesman, mutual fund salesperson, and financial advisor you encounter is a hardened criminal, and stick to low-cost index funds, and you’ll do just fine.
”
”
William J. Bernstein (If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly)
“
OVER THE next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a “Negro invasion” was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines—“Colored Buyers!”—which they ran in San Francisco newspapers.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
Since governments have the ability to both make and borrow money, why couldn’t the central bank lend money at an interest rate of about 0 percent to the central government to distribute as it likes to support the economy? Couldn’t it also lend to others at low rates and allow those debtors to never pay it back? Normally debtors have to pay back the original amount borrowed (principal) plus interest in installments over a period of time. But the central bank has the power to set the interest rate at 0 percent and keep rolling over the debt so that the debtor never has to pay it back. That would be the equivalent of giving the debtors the money, but it wouldn’t look that way because the debt would still be accounted for as an asset that the central bank owns, so the central bank could still say it is performing its normal lending functions. This is the exact thing that happened in the wake of the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many versions of this have happened many times in history. Who pays? It is bad for those outside the central bank who still hold the debts as assets—cash and bonds—who won’t get returns that would preserve their purchasing power. The biggest problem that we now collectively face is that for many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments, their incomes are low in relation to their expenses, and their debts and other liabilities (such as those for pensions, healthcare, and insurance) are very large relative to the value of their assets.
”
”
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
“
The best auto glass shop headquarter in Oakville. Speers Auto Glass offers fast & superior auto glass windshield repair & replace services at a lower price. Auto glass repairs for popular car makes & models start from the low $40 and please come in if you need us to repair stone chips, some maybe 100% free for you and paid to us by the insurance instead. Just ask! We are 100% confident in the quality of our work. we offer you a Lifetime Warranty on auto glass leakage and workmanship.
”
”
Speers Auto Glass
“
THE
PRACTICE & SCIENCE
OF
DRAWING BY HAROLD SPEED Associé de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, &c. With 93 Illustrations & Diagrams LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET
1913 Superior Formatting Publishing If you want more well formatted, classic books which have been formatted specifically for the Kindle platform then just search Amazon for "Superior Formatting Publishing". You can also browse and purchase our entire inventory at our website: SuperiorFormatting.com All of our books are priced as low as possible, feature a linked table of contents, cover art, and superior formatting. Our formatting techniques insures that all page breaks, indents, spacing and quotes are properly displayed on your Kindle device. Plate I. FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF SAME MONOCHROME PAINTING IN DIFFERENT STAGES ILLUSTRATING A METHOD OF STUDYING MASS DRAWING WITH THE BRUSH PREFACE Permit me in the first place to anticipate the disappointment of any student who opens this book with the idea of finding "wrinkles" on how to draw faces, trees, clouds, or what not, short cuts to excellence in drawing, or any of the tricks so popular with the drawing masters of our grandmothers and still dearly loved by a large number of people. No good can come of such methods, for there are no short cuts to excellence. But help of a very practical kind it is the aim of the following pages to give; although it may be necessary to make a greater call upon the intelligence of the student than these Victorian methods attempted.
”
”
Harold Speed (The Practice and Science of Drawing (Fully Illustrated and Formatted for Kindle))
“
But pleas about cost savings don’t get people to change their behavior. Neither do voluntary assessments that are supposed to scare people straight. The people who’d be most scared don’t show up for the assessments, because they know the assessments will tell them things they don’t want to hear. And the people who show up, unless they’re told they’re going to keel over within a year, figure they can make marginal changes and be fine. It makes you wonder whether the conventional corporate drive toward “wellness” isn’t just ineffective, but also a huge missed opportunity. The reigning assumption in the world of HR managers, large insurers, and policy wonks is that changing behavior is hard, so people need to be nudged toward healthy behaviors by making that change seem easy and palatable. “Gamify” it. Give people points for reading informative online articles about nutrition. Count pedometer steps. Make the healthy choices seem just a little bit different than the choices that result in chronic disease. Make the change seem smaller, so that people can follow a bread crumb trail of small adjustments to a better life without really changing their perspective. There are a lot of snazzy mobile apps and candy-colored motivational posters that push this approach. There are a lot of single-serving snacks with low calorie counts, sold as healthier-but-you-wouldn’t-know-it. They’re packed with sugar, so they end up making people hungrier and fatter.
”
”
J.C. Herz (Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness)
“
Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
At Insurance Covered TENS Units our goal is to help patients experiencing chronic pain get their TENS Units and Supplies covered through insurance. Chronic pain is a real problem for over 50 million Americans. TENS therapy has been used to relieve long-lasting and short-term pain. Some of the most common conditions TENS can help with include: Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Tendinitis, Bursitis, Labor pain, Low back pain, Pelvic pain, Period pain, Joint pain, And more...
”
”
Insurance Covered Tens Units
“
People trying to describe students of color often use words like “urban,” “inner city,” “disadvantaged,” or “at-risk” that gloss over the actual local needs of specific children and subgroups, such as racial groups (in some cases) or English language learners. Generic phrases like “low-income minority” can also mask differences in financial circumstance, like whether students are living in stable housing or rotating foster care or whether they have health insurance. These differences affect what assistance students need from educators and other opportunity providers to have an equal opportunity to succeed in school.
”
”
Mica Pollock (Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School)
“
Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family.
Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools.
In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
To solve the inability of middle-class renters to purchase single-family homes for the first time, Congress and President Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration in 1934. The FHA insured bank mortgages that covered 80 percent of purchase prices, had terms of twenty years, and were fully amortized. To be eligible for such insurance, the FHA insisted on doing its own appraisal of the property to make certain that the loan had a low risk of default. Because the FHA's appraisal standards included a whites-only requirement, racial segregation now became an official requirement of the federal mortgage insurance program. The FHA judged that properties would probably be too risky for insurance if they were in racially mixed neighborhoods or even in white neighborhoods near black ones that might possibly integrate in the future.
When a bank applied to the FHA for insurance on a prospective loan, the agency conducted a property appraisal, which was also likely performed by a local real estate agent hired by the agency. as the volume of applications increased, the agency hired its own appraisers, usually from the ranks of the private real estate agents who had previously been working as contractors for the FHA. To guide their work, the FHA provided them with an Underwriting Manual. The first, issued in 1935, gave this instruction: 'If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.' Appraisers were told to give higher ratings where '[p]rotection against some adverse influences is obtained,' and that '[i]mportant among adverse influences . . . are infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' The manual concluded that '[a]ll mortgages on properties protected against [such] unfavorable influences, to the extent such protection is possible, will obtain a high rating.'
The FHA discouraged banks from making any loans at all in urban neighborhoods rather than newly built suburbs; according to the Underwriting Manual, 'older properties . . . have a tendency to accelerate the rate of transition to lower class occupancy.' The FHA favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites, stating that '[n]atural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences, . . . includ[ing] prevention of the infiltration of . . . lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
A recent survey of private US health care facilities estimated that the support staff of hospital physicians spends nineteen hours a week interacting with insurance providers in prior authorizations, while clerical staff spend thirty-six hours a week filing claims. The cost of interactions between private health care providers and private insurance providers was estimated to be $68,000 per physician per year, totaling a whopping $31 billion per year—equivalent to the GDP of the Dominican Republic in 2005.22 The interaction costs in 1999 for the entire health care system, including private and public, were estimated on the low end to be $31 billion and on the high end to be $294 billion—which is comparable to the present day GDP of Singapore or Chile.
”
”
Cesar A. Hidalgo (Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies)
“
What American Healthcare Can Learn from Italy: Three Lessons It’s easy. First, learn to live like Italians. Eat their famous Mediterranean diet, drink alcohol regularly but in moderation, use feet instead of cars, stop packing pistols and dropping drugs. Second, flatten out the class structure. Shrink the gap between high and low incomes, raise pensions and minimum wages to subsistence level, fix the tax structure to favor the ninety-nine percent. And why not redistribute lifestyle too? Give working stiffs the same freedom to have kids (maternity leave), convalesce (sick leave), and relax (proper vacations) as the rich. Finally, give everybody access to health care. Not just insurance, but actual doctors, medications, and hospitals. As I write, the future of the Affordable Care Act is uncertain, but surely the country will not fall into the abyss that came before. Once they’ve had a taste of what it’s like not to be one heart attack away from bankruptcy, Americans won’t turn back the clock. Even what is lately being called Medicare for All, considered to be on the fringe left a decade ago and slammed as “socialized medicine,” is now supported by a majority of Americans, according to some polls. In practice, there’s little hope for Italian lessons one and two—the United States is making only baby steps toward improving its lifestyle, and its income inequality is worse every year. But the third lesson is more feasible. Like Italy, we can provide universal access to treatment and medications with minimal point-of-service payments and with prices kept down by government negotiation. Financial arrangements could be single-payer like Medicare or use private insurance companies as intermediaries like Switzerland, without copying the full Italian model of doctors on government salaries. Despite the death by a thousand cuts currently being inflicted on the Affordable Care Act, I am convinced that Americans will no longer stand for leaving vast numbers of the population uninsured, or denying medical coverage to people whose only sin is to be sick. The health care genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
”
”
Susan Levenstein (Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome)
“
Page 107 -- Trading minorities, it is argued, come into conflict with business rivals of other ethnic groups. Conflict occurs, not merely because of ordinary business rivalries, but because immigrant minorities are able to undercut their rivals by the use of their own credit institutions, their guild techniques of restraining competition among themselves, and their use of cheap, usually family, labor. Their interests also collide with the interests of those with whom they transact business: consumers, tenants, clients. Finally, because trading minorities have the ability to obtain their own cheap labor, they depress the prospects for labor in the host society. The tractable character of labor in middleman minority firms insures that rising wages in competing businesses would not be accompanied by similar increases for workers of minority firms. A competing firm in the host society that granted a wage increase would find itself priced out of the market. Eventually, workers in host society firms come to identify immigrant businesses and the low wages they pay as the source of the low wages paid in the economy generally
”
”
Donald L. Horowitz
“
India is one of the most populous nations in the world with intellect, care for family, and right mindedness in investments. Why ignore Insurance cover with such a low level of spend when it fits all these 3 attributes! Protect your self, family and assets.
”
”
Meera Srinivasan
“
Naturally, payment networks want to prevent fraudulent transactions, banks want to avoid bad loans, airlines want to avoid hijackings, and companies want to avoid hiring ineffective or untrustworthy people. From their point of view, the cost of a missed business opportunity is low, but the cost of a bad loan or a problematic employee is much higher, so it is natural for organizations to want to be cautious. If in doubt, they are better off saying no. However, as algorithmic decision-making becomes more widespread, someone who has (accurately or falsely) been labeled as risky by some algorithm may suffer a large number of those “no” decisions. Systematically being excluded from jobs, air travel, insurance coverage, property rental, financial services, and other key aspects of society is such a large constraint of the individual’s freedom that it has been called “algorithmic prison” [82]. In countries that respect human rights, the criminal justice system presumes innocence until proven guilty; on the other hand, automated systems can systematically and arbitrarily exclude a person from participating in society without any proof of guilt, and with little chance of appeal.
”
”
Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems)
“
Pittsburgh. The late 1930s. Fear was rampant as to where the next meal would come from. There was little in the way of excitement, just the day to day struggle to make ends meet. Little or no surprise existed, and hope was at a low ebb. In the middle of this, a man sold his life insurance policy. He bought a new car, a fur coat for his wife, boxing gloves for his sons, and four full bags of groceries for the family. He drove up the street for the neighborhood to see. The celebration was deafening. That was my father, and he taught me this lesson in scarcity. I never forgot it. Thanks, George.
”
”
Milton Katselas (Dreams into Action: Getting What You Want)
“
Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family.
Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
But as Bill Gates said to us when Mark and I met with him in his Seattle-area office, “People invest in high-probability scenarios: the markets that are there. And these low-probability things that maybe you should buy an insurance policy for by investing in capacity up front, don’t get done. Society allocates resources primarily in this capitalistic way. The irony is that there’s really no reward for being the one who anticipates the challenge.” Every time there is a new, serious viral outbreak, such as Ebola in 2012 and Zika in 2016, there is a public outcry, a demand to know why a vaccine wasn’t available to combat this latest threat. Next a public health official predicts a vaccine will be available in x number of months. These predictions almost always turn out to be wrong. And even if they’re right, there are problems in getting the vaccine production scaled up to meet the size and location of the threat, or the virus has receded to where it came from and there is no longer a demand for prevention or treatment. Here is Bill Gates again: Unfortunately, the message from the private sector has been quite negative, like H1N1 [the 2009 epidemic influenza strain]: A lot of vaccine was procured because people thought it would spread. Then, after it was all over, they sort of persecuted the WHO people and claimed GSK [GlaxoSmithKline] sold this stuff and they should have known the thing would end and it was a waste of money. That was bad. Even with Ebola, these guys—Merck, GSK, and J & J [Johnson & Johnson]—all spent a bunch of money and it’s not clear they won’t have wasted their money. They’re not break-even at this stage for the things they went and did, even though at the time everyone was saying, “Of course you’ll get paid. Just go and do all this stuff.” So it does attenuate the responsiveness. This model will never work or serve our worldwide needs. Yet if we don’t change the model, the outcome will not change, either.
”
”
Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs)
“
Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable.
”
”
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Some of the scientists on Dr. Molina’s committee like to point out that people can be pretty intelligent about managing risk in their personal lives. It is unlikely that your house will burn down, yet you spend hundreds of dollars a year on insurance. When you drive to work in the morning, the odds are low that some careless driver will slam into you, but it is possible, so we have spent tens of billions of dollars putting seatbelts and air bags in our cars. The issue of how much to spend on lowering greenhouse gases is, in essence, a question about how much insurance we want to buy against worst-case outcomes.
”
”
Anonymous
“
The pressure on life businesses and the capital fears prompted by the 2008 crisis have prompted the industry to build bigger capital cushions and cut costs. This has left insurers in a relatively good position. Investors have enjoyed decent dividends with payouts increasing by a cumulative 70% since 2009, according to FactSet. For shareholders, the risks to returns from life insurance have, so far, been balanced by earnings from nonlife insurance and asset management. Germany’s Allianz has U.S. bond house Pacific Investment Management Co. and nonlife insurance businesses, like property and casualty cover, around the world. Pimco has done well as interest rates declined and bond prices rose, but is expected to suffer once rates rise again—especially since founder Bill Gross walked out. France’s Axa similarly has global nonlife businesses and a large investment manager. However, these businesses ultimately will suffer from low investment returns. In nonlife, insurers can combat this with tougher underwriting standards. But demand for property-type insurance also suffers in a slower economy. Allianz has the lowest financial leverage of the big-three eurozone life insurers, and so has more flexibility to look for higher returns abroad. It also has a substantial general insurance business in the U.S., where rates should head higher sooner, and a higher expected dividend yield than France’s Axa or Italy’s Generali for this year and next.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Building Insurance Your Guide Review by Reedsy Discovery Reviewer Mardene Carr
Must read
”
”
Michael A.N.P. Cretikos
“
Kirkus Reviews:
Cretikos presents a brief but thorough introduction to properly calculating an insurance value for one’s property.
The author argues that there are fundamental flaws in the property insurance system, particularly in Australia, the
principalcountry in his analysis. At the heart of the issue, he asserts, is Building Sum Insured Value (BSI), which is the
monetary amount that the holder of an insurance policy receives in case of total loss. However, the formulas for calculating
this amount are fatally flawed, Cretikos says, as they rely upon a calculation of replacement value—the value of the
property immediately prior to the event that destroys it—and doesn’t factor in necessary supplementary costs, including
temporary housing. Moreover, the standard formula neglects inflation over the policy period, and especially increased
building costs. There’s currently “no legal definition of destruction, catastrophe, total loss, and constructive total loss,” nor
a standardized interpretation of the competencies required to be a Building Insurance Valuation Specialist Valuer
Practitioner. With impressive rigor, the author explains not only the technical challenges posed by the current
understanding of BSI, but also preventative measures and techniques one can adopt to avoid being disastrously
uninsured; for example, there’s a meticulous discussion of making a claim for the value of the contents of a property. Also,
Cretikos carefully reviews inadequacies in the legal system that encourage too-low BSI valuations and suggests
ameliorating legislation (although these discussions are mostly specific to New South Wales, Australia). He makes a
strong case that the insurance industry is plagued by a “denial culture” in which companies aggressively attempt to avoid
paying justified benefits, even if he does so in sometimes awkward prose: “Insurance providers employ deliberately crafted
legal jargon to avoid making complete schedule-related payments that are rightfully owed, even if this results in the
policyholder being compelled to bear out-of-pocket expenses that should be covered by Additional Benefits or other
supplementary expenses.” Still, this brief instructional guide offers a wealth of practical knowledge.
An expert tour of some fundamental building-insurance issues.
”
”
Michael A.N.P. Cretikos
“
[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Building Insurance Your Guide" by michael a.n.p. cretikos.]
________________________________________
5 out of 5 stars
________________________________________
Share This Review
FacebookTwitterLinkedInPinterestShare
________________________________________
Building Insurance: How to Select the Correct Building Sum Insured Value for Low-Rise and High-Rise Structures authored by Michael A. N. P. Cretikos is a comprehensive guide on how to select the best policy and factors to consider to avoid being in a situation of underinsurance. According to the author, he filled in the gap that exists in knowledge by introducing the Building Sum Insured Value (BSI) based on current rental value, and according to him, this method is the most accurate that there is.
The author highlighted situations in which underinsurance is inevitable and underlined ways to avoid such situations. Taxes such as stamp duties on insurance could be disincentives, and the author discouraged it. He advised the readers to always opt for 100% coverage so that the loss can be fully catered for and the insured reinstated back to their previous position. Several acts and policies were stated, and the authors made suggestions for innovations; the ICA code wasn’t left out; he highlighted the fault in it and gave feasible solutions.
This book was very informative, and I enjoyed reading it. The author's in-depth research shines through and adds a layer of authenticity to the book. I loved the fact that as much as the author criticized the already existing policies, he made suggestions for improvement. I equally appreciated the fact that there were so many quotations backed up with references so the readers can verify at their will. The step-by-step calculations and clearly outlined tables also enhanced my understanding of how numerical values are arrived at, and I absolutely loved it.
As much as I enjoyed reading this book, I found some parts overly repetitive, and I also found the consistent use of bold texts quite distracting. I loved the keypoints outlined in every section; it made the important information very easy to grasp. Overall, this book was an enlightening read and would keep readers eager to learn more.
I rate this book five out of five stars because of its informative contents and the fact that my dislikes weren’t enough to remove a star. I didn't find any errors while reading, which implies that the book was perfectly edited. I’d recommend this book to people who are interested in the workings of building insurance.
”
”
Michael A.N.P. Cretikos
“
Popular accounts portray Europe as either an economic phoenix or a basket case. The phoenix view observes that output per hour worked has risen from barely 50 percent of U.S. levels after World War II and two-thirds of those levels in 1970 to nearly 95 percent today and that labor productivity so measured is actually running above U.S. levels in a substantial number of Western European countries. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the euro zone has created more new jobs than either the United States or the United Kingdom. Its exports have grown faster than those of the United States. It provides more of its citizens with health insurance, efficient public transportation, and protection from violent crime.
The basket-case view observes that the growth of aggregate output and output per hour have slowed relative to the United States since the mid-1990s. Between 1999, when EMU began, and 2005, euro-zone growth averaged just 1.8 percent, less than two-thirds the 3.1 percent recorded by the United States. Productivity growth has trended downward since the early 1990s, owing to labor-, product-, and capital-market rigidities, inadequate R&D spending, and high tax rates - in contrast to the United States, where productivity growth has been rising. The growth of the working-age population has fallen to zero and is projected to turn significantly negative in coming years. High old-age dependency ratios imply large increases in the share of national income devoted to health care, lower savings rates, potentially heavier fiscal burdens, and an aversion to risk taking. All these are reasons to worry about Europe's competitiveness and economic performance.
One way of reconciling these views is to distinguish the distant from the recent past and the past from the future. Comparing the European economy at the midpoint and the end of the twentieth century, there is no disputing the phoenix view. Economic performance over this half century was a shining success both absolutely and relative to the United States. More recently, however, Europe has tended to lag. Although this does nothing to put the past in a less positive light, it creates doubts about the future.
One way of understanding these changing fortunes is in terms of the transition from extensive to intensive growth. Europe could grow quickly for a quarter century after World War II and continue doing well relative to the United States for some additional years because the institutions it inherited and developed after World War II were well suited for importing technology, maintaining high levels of investment, and transferring large amounts of labor from agriculture to industry. Eventually, however, the scope for further growth on this basis was exhausted. Once the challenge was to develop new technologies, and once growth came to depend more on entrepreneurial initiative than on brute-force capital accumulation, the low rates of R&D spending, high taxes, conservative finance, and emphasis on vocational education delivered by those same institutions became more of a handicap than a spur to growth. Consistent with this view is the fact that Europe's economic difficulties seem to have coincided with the ICT revolution and the opportunities it affords to economies with a comparative advantage in pioneering innovation, as well as with globalization and growing competition from developing countries such as China that are moving into the production of the quality manufacturing goods that have been a traditional European stronghold.
The question is what to do about it. Is it necessary for Europe to remake its institutions along American lines? Or is there still a future for the European model?
”
”
Barry Eichengreen (The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond)
“
As an accomplished entrepreneur with a history that spans more than fourteen years, Annette Wise is constantly looking for ways to give back to her community. Using enterprising efforts, she qualified for $125,000 in startup funding to develop a specialized residential facility that allows developmentally disabled adults to live in the community after almost a lifetime of living in a state institution.
In doing so, she has provided steady employment in her community for the last thirteen years. After dedicating years to her residential facility, Annette began to see clearly the difficulty business owners face in planning for retirement successfully.
Searching high and low to find answers, she took control of financial uncertainty and in less than 2 years, she became a Full Life Agent, licensed Registered Representative, Investment Advisor Representative and Limited Principal.
Her focus is on building an extensive list of clients that depend on her for smart retirement guidance, thorough college planning, detailed business continuation, and business exit strategies.
Clients have come to rely on Annette for insight on tax advantaged savings and retirement options.
Annette’s primary goal is to help her clients understand more than just concepts, but to easily understand how money works, the consequences of their decisions and how they work in conjunction with their desires and goal.
Ever the curious soul who is always up for a challenge, Annette is routinely resourceful at finding sensible means to a sometimes-challenging end. She believes in infinite possibilities as well as in sharing her knowledge with others. She is the go-to source for “Smart Wealth Solutions.”
Among Annette’s proudest accomplishments are her two wonderful sons, Michael III and Matthew. As a single mom, they have been her inspiration and joy. She is forever grateful to the greatest brothers in the world- Andrew and Anthony Wise, for assistance in grooming them into amazing young men.
”
”
Annette Wise