You need to worry about triglycerides too. I'm predisposed to very high levels...as high as 1200+ in the past....down to 540 these days....started on meds again and working out to try to get them under 200.
The reason I state this? I can't GET freakin' insurance.....unless you are working for someone else in a group plan, you can't get anyone to insure you. I have no other problems, BP is good, etc. I can more than afford to pay for insurance, but, I cannot get anyone reputible to sell it to me.
I didn't realize it would be so tough to get it at any price.
I'm self-employed, and was going through the whole insurance search, when I realized that some of my dependents had conditions that would possibly make them uninsurable in underwritten (non-group) plans.
The solution... CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. I had a couple of choices for where I live (one being the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the other being the Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce). They both offer good group insurance plans, and you just have to show you're a business and pay dues of around $100-$200 per year.
Oddly, it was significantly cheaper, instead of getting family coverage, to get one policy for me and my kids, and a separate individual policy for my wife, listing her as a co-owner of the business, which makes her qualify for her own coverage.
Maybe we should do away with insurance (averaging) altogether, and just have everyone pay for whatever happens to them. After all, if you don't have cancer, why should you pay extra for the people who do?
There seems to be a basic misunderstanding on here by about half the people as to what insurance is. Insurance is NOT the averaging of costs, so everyone pays the same. That's called socialism, not insurance. Insurance is paying for the risk of X, because you can afford the cost of the risk of X, but you cannot afford the cost of X itself, should it be required.
Insuring against things that are inevitable, like regular doctor visits, is not insurance, and is messed up.
Example: If I have a 0.0001% chance of requiring open heart surgery in the next year, which would cost $1,000,000, then the cost of that risk should be about $1, and if I pay that, plus enough to cover the administration costs, an insurance company should be able to cover me. If my chance was 1%, then the cost of my risk would be $10,000. Well, that's pretty big, but I could still afford it a lot more than I could afford the million, but I'd probably have to just take my chances. But if my risk was that high, that would be the fair price of the insurance. So if those represent the extremes, why not split the difference and have everyone pay $5,000, and have everyone be covered? Because my health is my own responsibility, no one else's. It doesn't matter if my risk is 1% because of genetics or personal actions or anything else. The only way that the guy with a 0.0001% risk is going to pay $5,000 to cover my risk is if the government puts a gun to his head and says he has to. And that's a moral outrage and contemptible.
In summary, insurance only makes sense for *unlikely* things, and socialism is evil.
This is why private insurance is a bad thing- their job isn't to maximize protection, but to maximize profit. Ideally, they would want to insure only the people who don't get sick and none of those that do, to make 100% of that money in profit. In other words, they want to make it a giant scam, taking your money but providing no services.
Is that you, Hillary? Their job is to insure people -- and to offer a competitive product that people appreciate and recommend to others. By your logic it's Jiffy Lube's job to make your oil dirty.
So no, this is *not* a good thing. This is a perversion that will inflate the pockets of wealthy insurance companies while bankrupting the lower and middle classes. This is why we need to get rid of insurance companies and get government healcare *now*.
Riiiiiight, because the government *does* care about us, and *does not* try to scam us for its own devious ends. So we should put all our lives in the government's hands as quickly as possible. No thanks. I'll take the multiple private companies competing for by business, who have to illustrate their good will to me, and who have a financial interest in pleasing me, who I can choose amongst; rather than one central government entity with no interest other than concentrating its own power, among which I can only blissfully hope there exists some shred of good will, and some grubby reflection of intelligence, with no alternative to choose from and no power over.
Let's say it together, my brothers and sisters, LIVE FREE OR DIE!
I truly fear the future where we treat insurance as a personal thing. We invented insurance as a way to spread risk. If we charge you directly for your risk, we are creating no economic benefit. It just means that in the future, I'll have to bear the entire cost of my cancer treatments.
No, the point of insurance has always been for the individual to pay the full cost of his individual RISK. You're paying the company to bear the uncertainty, which they can do because they can aggregate many uncertainties together. If your risk of needing cancer treatments in the future is 100%, then the concept of insurance doesn't apply (unless you bought insurance when the risk was less than 100%, and now the company has to pay up).
And the healthy? You'll get the privilege to pay a private company to absorb zero risk.
Similarly, if someone has zero risk (which no one does), they have no business buying any kind of insurance, as it would be throwing away money.
Eventually the system will break down into the higher risks paying absolutely oodles and the lower risks paying a pittance to the point that it would be just the same if they paid for the damage caused in their car crashes themselves. We're already seeing this in the UK with 5-years no-claims only insurers, or women-only insurers; eventually all the people who can fit in those categories will do so and get a pretty much flat rate and all the rest will be lumped together into a few insurers who won't have any other low risk customers and will be charging everyone a very high rate. At which point THE WHOLE PURPOSE OF INSURANCE BREAKS DOWN!
That doesn't make sense unless everyone who buys insurance crashes. It sounds like the government there is preventing companies from charging risk-based rates, and so the risk groups have formed like this? As described, that is exactly how insurance should work, although less efficient since the risk classes are forced to be handled by separate companies. Within each risk group, in essence all subscribers are pitching in to pay for the minority of subscribers who actually do crash. That is the point of insurance.
Encouraging Americans to be healthy is great. I don't really have a problem with charging those who smoke more, for instance. But high blood pressure? Come on, that's hereditary. Once you start discriminating against people for their genetic makeup, you're on a slope that is not just slippery, but frictionless.
This has nothing to do with encouraging Americans to be healthy or penalizing people for their behavior. It's about charging them for what they buy. Alcoholism can be hereditary too, but we should still make them pay for the alcohol they consume. Sensitivity to the sun is hereditary, but we still charge those people for the sunscreen they need. If a medical condition is a person's own fault, or if it's a genetic condition, is no one's business but that person's.
But there's plenty of precedent for discriminating based on whatever statistics show. For example, the 16 year old boy can't help that he's 16 or a boy, but he still gets charged more for car insurance than 16 year old girls or 56 year old men. Insurance isn't made to be totally fair.
Actually, it IS made to be totally fair. Charging people according to their statistical risk, to the degree that that can be determined, is totally fair. Charging people a common averaged fee, regardless of their individual risk, is totally unfair.
I always thought of medical insurance as a socialist concept. Everyone pays into a bucket, and the sick people take out of it when needed. So long as there are more healthy people than sick people, it should work. Even in capitalist implementations of medical insurance schemes.
So if sick people need to pay more than healthy people, what's the point of having insurance? Healthy people then shouldn't need to pay anything, as they aren't costing anyoen anything. And sick people should pay everything, as only they need it. Which completely voids any reason to send any money to the insurance guy. OK, that's going further than this article summary sounded, but if this idea gains any momentum that may be where we end up at.
The concept of medical insurance has been highly perverted. It actually works as insurance if it's only there to protect you from the costs of things like major surgery. But when it's used as a buffer to pay for EVERY medical expense it turns into something that is nothing like insurance, and is a lot like a socialist economy. The reforms, such as the ones being discussed, are attempting to make it more like insurance again. Part of that requires that higher risk people pay more because they're buying more. Just like if your house is located in a flood zone on a fault line you're probably going to pay a lot more for your home insurance than if your house is an underground bunker in Kansas. It doesn't matter if you inherited your house, and so it's not fair because it wasn't your choice. It still costs more if you want the insurance, and it IS fair.
How about this, as a related idea... Old people should pay more into social security because they use it more. young people should get discounts because they're a long way away from taking it. I bet todays elderly would get all riled up if we tried to make that change, eh?
The analogy doesn't fit. Social Security is an income annuity product which Americans must buy. The analogy would be giving working people discounts on their Social Security payments if they were in poor health or charging them extra if they were in good health -- or else increasing a retiree's benefits if they are in poor health or reducing their benefits if they are in good health. With commercially sold annuities you can do this -- get a higher benefit for your money by sending the insurance company your medical records to show a medical condition, like a heart attack or stroke, which implies a shorter life expectancy.
If this is meant to be motivation to fix things, some things cannot be fixed. I've got high cholesterol. Very high. And very bad ratio of HDL to LDL. I'm relatively young, 31. I've gotten into running, have done a couple relay marathons (split the maraton distance between four runners) and am currently training for a 1/2 marathon. While still bad, my cholesterol measurements were better BEFORE I started running. Now after doing it for a few years, my cholesterol is 20 total points higher and it's time for the pills to fight it. Weird but true. Not sure what my genetics have in mind, but the doctor told me of other patients more athletic than I am trying to become are not able to lower their cholesterol without pills either. No amount of financial motivation can change that, and no amount of financial punishment for testing poorly will help either.
It's not a punishment. Statistically, you are more likely to end up needing open heart surgery at some point compared to someone else just like you without the high cholesterol. The point of insurance is to pay a smaller amount (the premium) to cover the small possibility of requiring a larger amount (the cost of the surgery). If you were twice as likely as the other guy to need the surgery, then the fair price for that insurance would be twice as much as the fair price for the other guy.
Encouraging Americans to be healthy is great. I don't really have a problem with charging those who smoke more, for instance. But high blood pressure? Come on, that's hereditary. Once you start discriminating against people for their genetic makeup, you're on a slope that is not just slippery, but frictionless.
So? This isn't about penalizing people for their behavior, it's about charging them for what they buy. Alcoholism can be hereditary too, but we should still make them pay for the alcohol they consume. Sensitivity to the sun is hereditary, but we still charge those people for the sunscreen they need.
The article, and a page it links from some guy at NASA, says that trying to hold your breath will kill you, and both compare it to holding your breath while ascending in diving. But the linked resources also point out that when the vacuum of space enters your lungs it turns the inside of your lungs into a bloody mess in a matter of seconds, which you may or may not survive. It seems like the best course of action by far is to keep enough air in your lungs to keep the gases in your blood from ripping your lung tissue apart, but not keeping so much that it does damage by expanding beyond your lung capacity. Perhaps just fully exhaling, and then holding your breath would be best. Any informed opinions on this?
The Neanderthals were probably complaining about our causing air pollution with all the spears and arrows we filled it with when they came around, as well as our running off with the cute chicks.
Cute Neanderthal chicks? I donno. The jutting brow and the bit about being three times stronger than me somehow doesn't do it for me. The larger brain leaves me a little intimidated as well.
What, you think some this stuff hasn't been periodically thawing out since it got stuck there 8 million years ago?
That's pretty much what they mean when they say "8 million year-old ice". It's ice that froze in a protected location, (in Greenland or Antarctica) that generally gets new snowfall both during the ice ages and the warm periods between ice ages, and doesn't melts. In other words these are places where the ice has been steadily accumulating since the cycle of ice ages began, including through much warmer climates than our current one. (This is also how we know about the content of the atmosphere over the past million+ years, as it's been trapped in that ice the whole time, older ice the deeper we dig.)
TFA says it is global warming uncovering these bacteria that are 8 million years old...
It doesn't actually say that, fortunately, although the way they throw around "global warming" in these articles, it's easy to get that impression. They have to dig for the old samples. For the most part, the only ice that melts naturally (or because of "global warming") is ice that froze during the last ice age, meaning ice that is less than 120,000 years old. The temperatures before the last ice age were significantly warmer than they are now, so a lot more of the truly old ice melted in that interglacial than is going to melt in this one, and would have released bacteria at least as old as will be released now (except for scientists melting the 8-million-year-old stuff). I suppose the Neanderthals were probably complaining pretty bitterly about our species over-using fire for such petty uses as melting jewelery and whatnot, thereby contributing to global warming, when their species was cold-adapted.
Ask people who lived along the Gulf Coast in 2005 whether the eye has to pass over for the storm to devastate. Or ask the rest of us who stood in 1985's Gloria.
Better yet, don't ask anyone. You'll just piss us off when you try to pretend that actual disasters that kill people are less real than your asteroid paranoia.
You seem to be avoiding the question of whether or not NYC skyscrapers should be built to sustain hurricane force winds, seeing as they were last seen in NYC 186 years ago. Obviously they should. Just as we should protect ourselves from other rare but devastating natural disasters.
A hurricane hit NYC 20 years ago. I was standing in it at the time. We're overdue. Meanwhile, Climate Change is increasing those probabilities, and the size of the damage when they do hit.
Thanks for weighing in to demonstrate you don't even have the basic facts or logic to weigh in on this subject. Saves a lot of time humoring you in a boring, drawn out display.
Meanwhile, Climate Change is increasing those probabilities, and the size of the damage when they do hit.
Thanks for weighing in to demonstrate you don't even have the basic facts or logic to weigh in on this subject. Saves a lot of time humoring you in a boring, drawn out display.
By your reasoning, I guess you wouldn't waste the money to make NYC skyscrapers capable of withstanding hurricane force winds, since it's not bloody likely that a hurricane will hit NYC in the next 100 years.
Still, it's only twice as effective. So it would presumably be a lot easier and more reliable to send two surface-impact missiles than to send one that is capable of boring into the surface. Plus the latter requires a whole nother scale of intelligence gathering about the rock. Add to all that the fact that Bruce Willis is indispensable here on earth.
It's mostly being used just as a hypothetical. But also, we can't predict very well how its orbit will change after its 2029 encounter, so one of the scenarios they used is if its 2036 encounter turns into a threat after its 2029 encounter.
edit: Would an explosion in space even function in the same manner?
No, which is why the standoff neutron bomb is a good option. In the atmosphere the high speed neutrons emitted are absorbed by the atmosphere within the actual blast radius. In space, nothing would slow or stop the neutrons between the explosion and the asteroid. (And they can also directionally focus the neutrons at the asteroid)
The chances of getting hit by an asteroid are extremely small.
Actually the chances of us getting hit by an asteroid are close to 100% -- it's just a question of when. The chances of us having to use the technology in our own lifetimes are extremely small, but even if those chances were zero, it would still be worth our money to have that technology ready for when it IS needed.
exploding nuclear weapons from a distance only works if the asteroid is fairly solid, like the metallic [M-type] asteroids. The more porous asteroids [there seem to be many] don't seem to respond as well to such explosions.
That doesn't seem to jibe with what the study says, or common sense. A uniform flux of high-speed neutrons would impart momentum evenly, even if the asteroid was not solid at all. That seems to be a big reason for why standoff nukes a preferred to surface nukes, along with the risk of fracturing it.
As for the Armageddon-type way of dealing with asteroids, you just made a single asteroid into a hail of dangerous shrapnel. Although if we exploded a nuclear charge [a smaller one] that only tosses up a part of the asteroid and direct the shrapnel away from Eath, the shrapnel would go in one direction [wherever your plan dictates] and the asteroid generally goes in the opposing direction, knocking it off course. over a period of several years even a small orbital change will result in Earth being safe for now.
As the study shows, very little is gained by blowing off a small chunk of the asteroid (subsurface explosion) compared to just using a surface explosion.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm self-employed, and was going through the whole insurance search, when I realized that some of my dependents had conditions that would possibly make them uninsurable in underwritten (non-group) plans.
The solution... CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. I had a couple of choices for where I live (one being the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the other being the Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce). They both offer good group insurance plans, and you just have to show you're a business and pay dues of around $100-$200 per year.
Oddly, it was significantly cheaper, instead of getting family coverage, to get one policy for me and my kids, and a separate individual policy for my wife, listing her as a co-owner of the business, which makes her qualify for her own coverage.
There seems to be a basic misunderstanding on here by about half the people as to what insurance is. Insurance is NOT the averaging of costs, so everyone pays the same. That's called socialism, not insurance. Insurance is paying for the risk of X, because you can afford the cost of the risk of X, but you cannot afford the cost of X itself, should it be required.
Insuring against things that are inevitable, like regular doctor visits, is not insurance, and is messed up.
Example: If I have a 0.0001% chance of requiring open heart surgery in the next year, which would cost $1,000,000, then the cost of that risk should be about $1, and if I pay that, plus enough to cover the administration costs, an insurance company should be able to cover me. If my chance was 1%, then the cost of my risk would be $10,000. Well, that's pretty big, but I could still afford it a lot more than I could afford the million, but I'd probably have to just take my chances. But if my risk was that high, that would be the fair price of the insurance. So if those represent the extremes, why not split the difference and have everyone pay $5,000, and have everyone be covered? Because my health is my own responsibility, no one else's. It doesn't matter if my risk is 1% because of genetics or personal actions or anything else. The only way that the guy with a 0.0001% risk is going to pay $5,000 to cover my risk is if the government puts a gun to his head and says he has to. And that's a moral outrage and contemptible.
In summary, insurance only makes sense for *unlikely* things, and socialism is evil.
Is that you, Hillary? Their job is to insure people -- and to offer a competitive product that people appreciate and recommend to others. By your logic it's Jiffy Lube's job to make your oil dirty.
Riiiiiight, because the government *does* care about us, and *does not* try to scam us for its own devious ends. So we should put all our lives in the government's hands as quickly as possible. No thanks. I'll take the multiple private companies competing for by business, who have to illustrate their good will to me, and who have a financial interest in pleasing me, who I can choose amongst; rather than one central government entity with no interest other than concentrating its own power, among which I can only blissfully hope there exists some shred of good will, and some grubby reflection of intelligence, with no alternative to choose from and no power over.
Let's say it together, my brothers and sisters, LIVE FREE OR DIE!
No, the point of insurance has always been for the individual to pay the full cost of his individual RISK. You're paying the company to bear the uncertainty, which they can do because they can aggregate many uncertainties together. If your risk of needing cancer treatments in the future is 100%, then the concept of insurance doesn't apply (unless you bought insurance when the risk was less than 100%, and now the company has to pay up).
Similarly, if someone has zero risk (which no one does), they have no business buying any kind of insurance, as it would be throwing away money.
That doesn't make sense unless everyone who buys insurance crashes. It sounds like the government there is preventing companies from charging risk-based rates, and so the risk groups have formed like this? As described, that is exactly how insurance should work, although less efficient since the risk classes are forced to be handled by separate companies. Within each risk group, in essence all subscribers are pitching in to pay for the minority of subscribers who actually do crash. That is the point of insurance.
This has nothing to do with encouraging Americans to be healthy or penalizing people for their behavior. It's about charging them for what they buy. Alcoholism can be hereditary too, but we should still make them pay for the alcohol they consume. Sensitivity to the sun is hereditary, but we still charge those people for the sunscreen they need. If a medical condition is a person's own fault, or if it's a genetic condition, is no one's business but that person's.
Actually, it IS made to be totally fair. Charging people according to their statistical risk, to the degree that that can be determined, is totally fair. Charging people a common averaged fee, regardless of their individual risk, is totally unfair.
The concept of medical insurance has been highly perverted. It actually works as insurance if it's only there to protect you from the costs of things like major surgery. But when it's used as a buffer to pay for EVERY medical expense it turns into something that is nothing like insurance, and is a lot like a socialist economy. The reforms, such as the ones being discussed, are attempting to make it more like insurance again. Part of that requires that higher risk people pay more because they're buying more. Just like if your house is located in a flood zone on a fault line you're probably going to pay a lot more for your home insurance than if your house is an underground bunker in Kansas. It doesn't matter if you inherited your house, and so it's not fair because it wasn't your choice. It still costs more if you want the insurance, and it IS fair.
The analogy doesn't fit. Social Security is an income annuity product which Americans must buy. The analogy would be giving working people discounts on their Social Security payments if they were in poor health or charging them extra if they were in good health -- or else increasing a retiree's benefits if they are in poor health or reducing their benefits if they are in good health. With commercially sold annuities you can do this -- get a higher benefit for your money by sending the insurance company your medical records to show a medical condition, like a heart attack or stroke, which implies a shorter life expectancy.
It's not a punishment. Statistically, you are more likely to end up needing open heart surgery at some point compared to someone else just like you without the high cholesterol. The point of insurance is to pay a smaller amount (the premium) to cover the small possibility of requiring a larger amount (the cost of the surgery). If you were twice as likely as the other guy to need the surgery, then the fair price for that insurance would be twice as much as the fair price for the other guy.
For the love of all that is good and holy, I hope that this was a joke, and that the people who modded it insightful were high on acid at the time.
So? This isn't about penalizing people for their behavior, it's about charging them for what they buy. Alcoholism can be hereditary too, but we should still make them pay for the alcohol they consume. Sensitivity to the sun is hereditary, but we still charge those people for the sunscreen they need.
Come on, people. Communism isn't cool.
The article, and a page it links from some guy at NASA, says that trying to hold your breath will kill you, and both compare it to holding your breath while ascending in diving. But the linked resources also point out that when the vacuum of space enters your lungs it turns the inside of your lungs into a bloody mess in a matter of seconds, which you may or may not survive. It seems like the best course of action by far is to keep enough air in your lungs to keep the gases in your blood from ripping your lung tissue apart, but not keeping so much that it does damage by expanding beyond your lung capacity. Perhaps just fully exhaling, and then holding your breath would be best. Any informed opinions on this?
...something else to drive up the price of oil!
Cute Neanderthal chicks? I donno. The jutting brow and the bit about being three times stronger than me somehow doesn't do it for me. The larger brain leaves me a little intimidated as well.
That's pretty much what they mean when they say "8 million year-old ice". It's ice that froze in a protected location, (in Greenland or Antarctica) that generally gets new snowfall both during the ice ages and the warm periods between ice ages, and doesn't melts. In other words these are places where the ice has been steadily accumulating since the cycle of ice ages began, including through much warmer climates than our current one. (This is also how we know about the content of the atmosphere over the past million+ years, as it's been trapped in that ice the whole time, older ice the deeper we dig.)
It doesn't actually say that, fortunately, although the way they throw around "global warming" in these articles, it's easy to get that impression. They have to dig for the old samples. For the most part, the only ice that melts naturally (or because of "global warming") is ice that froze during the last ice age, meaning ice that is less than 120,000 years old. The temperatures before the last ice age were significantly warmer than they are now, so a lot more of the truly old ice melted in that interglacial than is going to melt in this one, and would have released bacteria at least as old as will be released now (except for scientists melting the 8-million-year-old stuff). I suppose the Neanderthals were probably complaining pretty bitterly about our species over-using fire for such petty uses as melting jewelery and whatnot, thereby contributing to global warming, when their species was cold-adapted.
You seem to be avoiding the question of whether or not NYC skyscrapers should be built to sustain hurricane force winds, seeing as they were last seen in NYC 186 years ago. Obviously they should. Just as we should protect ourselves from other rare but devastating natural disasters.
1) The only hurricane in modern times known to pass directly over parts of New York City was in 1821. The Hudson and the East River merged over Lower Manhattan.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/050601_hur
2) Accusing people of not knowing the basic facts when you don't know the basic facts is pretty lame.
3) I don't mean to blow your anonymity, but did you happen to invent the Internet?
lol. moron.
By your reasoning, I guess you wouldn't waste the money to make NYC skyscrapers capable of withstanding hurricane force winds, since it's not bloody likely that a hurricane will hit NYC in the next 100 years.
Still, it's only twice as effective. So it would presumably be a lot easier and more reliable to send two surface-impact missiles than to send one that is capable of boring into the surface. Plus the latter requires a whole nother scale of intelligence gathering about the rock. Add to all that the fact that Bruce Willis is indispensable here on earth.
It's mostly being used just as a hypothetical. But also, we can't predict very well how its orbit will change after its 2029 encounter, so one of the scenarios they used is if its 2036 encounter turns into a threat after its 2029 encounter.
The standoff neutron bomb. 1,001 uses.
No, which is why the standoff neutron bomb is a good option. In the atmosphere the high speed neutrons emitted are absorbed by the atmosphere within the actual blast radius. In space, nothing would slow or stop the neutrons between the explosion and the asteroid. (And they can also directionally focus the neutrons at the asteroid)
Actually the chances of us getting hit by an asteroid are close to 100% -- it's just a question of when. The chances of us having to use the technology in our own lifetimes are extremely small, but even if those chances were zero, it would still be worth our money to have that technology ready for when it IS needed.
That doesn't seem to jibe with what the study says, or common sense. A uniform flux of high-speed neutrons would impart momentum evenly, even if the asteroid was not solid at all. That seems to be a big reason for why standoff nukes a preferred to surface nukes, along with the risk of fracturing it.
As the study shows, very little is gained by blowing off a small chunk of the asteroid (subsurface explosion) compared to just using a surface explosion.