And just picture the guy in prison that has to stamp out the license plates with the Live Free Or Die on them all day long.

A well reasoned post, however, reinsurance is not as much "insurance for the insurance" but really looks more like financing so as to maintain working capital to grow your insurance business. By sloughing off your insured limits to another party, it frees you up to write even more insurance. The cost of doing that is akin to interest on a loan.

Mission to Mars - Epcot Center - You can go for less than $100. And when you come back, you can watch people vomit!

I've been watching the media coverage (and listening - NPR) on this whole encryption mudslinging by law enforcement. The media is eating it up, and while they are careful to say that the jury is out on whether or not the terrorists in Paris used encrypted communications, they are quick to say that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had no inkling that this attack was on the horizon. I will leave aside the notion that Occum's Razor can be used to evaluate the two scenarios - one where the agencies and law enforcement were simply incompetent and are now blaming this evil encryption for being caught flatfooted, vs. their premise that the terrorists MUST be using encryption now...

What is lost on all of them (agencies, law enforcement) is THAT THEY DID THIS TO THEMSELVES either way. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been "hoovering up" all available communications data and metadata. They demanded and got kangaroo courts (FISA - I'm looking at you) where secret search warrants are being executed. There is no regulation by the citizenry, only by government "you can trust us" types who don't understand that when the stories about this stuff break, consumers begin to demand secure communications. Every time the government executed these warrants on the communications and computer industries, they gave them both an incentive to ditch the whole cooperation thing, and finally those companies started encrypting things in a way that they did not have the ability to "listen in" because lets face it, that is a pain in the neck and takes them away from their core mission.

Now they are crying about encryption, without understanding that the ship already sailed... And they are the ones that kicked it out of the harbor.

Me and thousands of people saw an F-117 up close at the New England Airshow at Westover AFB about 20 years ago. You couldn't touch it or walk under it, as it was cordoned off with ropes. A soldier with an M-16 guarded it. My dad struck up a conversation and said "That gun isn't loaded." and the soldier said "Yes sir, it is loaded" My dad took that at face value but went on and said "But if I crossed the rope you wouldn't shoot me." and the soldier replied "Yes sir, I would shoot you". At that point, I took my dad's arm and started walking him away from the display saying "Come on, Dad, let's stop annoying the man with the automatic weapon"

Looking back at the soldier, I could see just the hint of a smile on his face as we walked away.

In the Palormares incident in 1966, a B-52 collided with a refueling tanker and both planes were lost. The plane was carrying 4 nuclear weapons, 3 of which were found on land (and two had their conventional explosives go off), but one fell into the Med. Dr. John P. Craven used a Bayesian Search theory to locate the lost bomb. The first step in the Bayesian Search is to formulate hypotheses for where the bomb might have gone down. Craven put a bottle of Scotch up as a prize for the person who came closest to where the bomb would actually be found, and got several hypotheses for where the bomb went down. While this isn't exactly the type of gambling discussed above, putting a real reward up clearly motivates people to give their very best guesses! Oh yeah, they found the bomb, and the actual recovery of it was fictionalized in the movie Men of Honor with Deniro and Cuba Gooding Jr.

On Earth, we refer to hydrocarbons as fuel, and we use the oxygen in our atmosphere to burn them. We call the air an "Oxidizer"

On Titan, if there were any "natives", would they call oxygen "fuel" and their hydrocarbons "Hydrocarbonizers"?

Mod parent up. The F111 is the perfect example of why you DON'T try and build a plane to take on more than one, maybe two, roles. Why did we build both the F16 and the F15 at essentially the same time? Two different roles. The F15 was originally designed to be a deep interdiction plane to shoot down Russian bombers. F16's are not meant to do that. They are supposed to provide in theater air superiority. So the 16 has one engine, the 15 has two. Not to mention the 16 is cheaper. The F14 was of the same era, but designed around the all important tail hook. Add the A-10's and you've got yourself a great air force (AF, Navy, Marines) and nobody's gonna stop you.

Today, we killed the A-10 to feed the F35 machine, a plane that essentially tries to be one aircraft for everyone. But that is even harder to do today, because all our planes have to have INTERNAL bomb bays for stealth now, which means that you lose flexibility on all those planes. Some of the 35's will be VSTAL, some will be Air Force fighters, some try to be Marine attack aircraft. The end result? They can't do any of them really well. At least the Air Force was able to hedge its bets with the F22 - the greatest fighter plane ever made. But they got too few of them as they are so expensive.

The bottom line is our military must work out what planes they need for what roles, share the components of those planes only when it makes sense to do so, and stop thinking about the export market. Let Lockheed Martin and Boeing figure that stuff out. Let our military spec the planes they need, and pay the contractors to build what they want. If you do that, no one will challenge the US from the air.

Don't forget that Shepard had to urinate in his suit because of delays in his launch. Seems like his suit should cost more to "preserve"...

I think you are romanticizing the past. Will you get rid of automatic chokes, electronic ignition too? I'm old enough to remember cars in those days. My 1972 Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon had a very intricate starting procedure. You had to push the gas pedal all the way to the floor to set the choke. Then pump the gas pedal 2-3 times to prime the carb. Then you had to "crack" the gas pedal just the right amount. THEN you could turn the ignition key. Assuming the car turned over, it MIGHT start. Then, if it did not, you pumped the gas pedal one more time in case there was not enough fuel yet. Don't do it twice though. If you did, the engine was now "flooded" and you had to wait 15 minutes to try again. It's also possible that the one extra pump of the pedal flooded it. If you were lucky, the car started on the first try, but more likely it took 2, maybe 3 turns of the key to get the thing to start.

Today, you get in, turn the key enough to engage the starter. I you let it go, the car continues to crank until started. At least that's what my Expedition does. Anyway, it starts every time unless the battery is dead, or there is some other big problem. Sure, your old car was easy to work on. That's just another way of saying that it was always broken by today's standards.

When the government is representing me, and is supposed to serve me, and then does what is financially good for them to my detriment, yes, it is bad... and wrong.

I live in the Hartford CT area and we have Trash to Energy AND single stream recycling. First - Trash to Energy. The poster above was correct about it not being much of a net energy gain. They burn it in an oil fired plant. Cardboard, food waste, etc. all gets burned. The big thing isn't the energy as much as it is that we don't need a dump anymore except for the ash, which is compact and easy to dispose of. The main garbage dump in Hartford was closed years ago. So overall, a good option to lower the volume of landfilled items and that is the main benefit.

As for single stream, we used to sort it, but now use a large single stream bin. A great improvement all around. Here's why: I toured the recycling center with my daughter's elementary school class. I watched the trucks pull in. This was in the "sort it" days. So a guy would pick up your bin, throw the cardboard with the cardboard, the plastic with the plastic (by type), the glass with the glass, etc. The truck had an opening for each. Anyway, the truck pulls into the recycling center, and the back opens, and the dumper rises, and all of it gets mixed together! I finally asked why, and they didn't have a good answer. So what was the point? It was totally inefficient in that the sorting process the guy did at every house was essentially a useless exercise. And he knew it too, so those sorts were not particularly well done. Bottom line, single stream makes far more sense - sort it at the recycling facility. Don't pay a guy to do it at the curb. Have a truck pick up a big bin automatically.

Finally, the financial end of this... When we went to single stream, we got a garbage can (95gal) and a recycle can (95gal). We found we were producing more garbage than recycling. So I sent my brother in law, who was living with us to go purchase another garbage can. They explained to him that they would like to sell him a recycling can instead. The town made money on the recycling, and garbage cost them. So he came home empty handed. I told him to go down and buy the extra garbage can - I didn't care what it cost the TOWN... I cared about keeping the garbage out of the recycling. So I sent him back and reluctantly they sold him another garbage can.

Roll the clock forward, and the town does what government does best. Since they made money on recycling, they announced that anyone who had more than one garbage can would be issued a new recycle bin and they would be taking the extra garbage can that I had paid for away. And recycling would only pick up every other week. And if I wanted to keep my extra garbage can, I had to pay a $150 a year subscription for it. So, they did what made economic sense for them at my expense.

Of course, my solution to this was simple. I had the same number of cans, it's just one went from Garbage Green to Recycle Blue. So I threw my garbage in the recycle bins. Problem solved for me. And probably part of the reason recycling is more expensive now because of short sighted government workers wishing things were different and turning me into a profit center!

That, and we must never forget that as much as we may applaud the insurance company in this particular story for calling out poor practices, the primary purpose of a modern insurance company is to take your money and give you nothing in return. Everybody needs to be very aware of that, and be untrusting in all your dealings with anyone in the insurance business.

As in all industries, there are the good and the bad. I would posit that you are speaking about "bad" insurance companies, not good ones. Not every insurance company dreams of giving you "nothing in return" for your premium dollars. Quite the contrary, if insurance companies never paid any claims, there would be no need for them, and their premiums would dry up immediately. The primary purpose of an insurance is to transfer risk... in effect, pooling it and transferring the risk from one entity to several/many. Believe it or not, this enables many things. Even things like the Ansari X-Prize. The organization awarding the prize didn't have the money to pay the prize, they only had about half of it. They used that to buy an insurance policy, which paid the claim when the prize was won. Regardless, most insurance companies invest in their claim handling capabilities as it is a competitive advantage to have good claim paying history. Doubt it? Compare "The General" auto insurance claims paying vs. USAA or Amica. The latter pride themselves on claim paying. Personally, I have a policy for my house, that recently paid a claim and paid on items I never expected them to reimburse me for. Their claim handler went out of her way to make sure I got far more money than I had anticipated. The bottom line is that its easy to pick on insurance companies, but if you do your research and buy policies from reputable companies, you'll likely have a great experience with them when you have to file a claim. If you go for the cut rate, "The General" type companies, well you got what you paid for.

It is easy to leave a bank. Just turn off your direct deposit and take out all your money. You don't have to visit the bank to do that... you can take all your money out via a check, leave a buck or two just to make sure it clears, and you're out. Oh yes, the bank will not like this. They will charge your account a service fee. And there won't be any money in the account to cover the service fee. And so they will charge you an overdraw fee. But at the end of the statement period, many banks will see your negative balance, and then deposit a "credit to avoid account closure"... they will do this forever. And each month, they will mail you a statement, that probably cost them several dollars to create, and then pay postage to mail it to you. And each month, you get this piece of paper saying that your account balance is 0.00. And you get to see their computers dutifully charge the fees, and then post the credit. And all of it costs them money. I have an account that has been like this for about 10 years now. I just throw the envelope away now, but it always brings a smile to my face to see that they are essentially wasting all their own money and will never ever recoup it. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

This is what it has come to. The cop used to be your friend, right? But now he's not. Well, the cops didn't change, we did. In the old days a copy could say "Stop or I'll shoot" and if you didn't stop, he shot you in the back... Look at "It's a Wonderful Life"... Bert the cop does that to George (but misses)... no question back in the day, the cops could say "get on the ground" and you'd get on the ground. Now, we don't... we won't... go ahead, shoot me... you'll do time in prison Mr. Cop... you'll go down for 2nd Degree Murder. Watch "Cops" and see people who think they'll negotiate their way out of being dumped on the ground and cuffed. And it's all on the cop to make sure he is polite, doesn't use excessive force (which will be decided later, possibly by a jury) and that when someone spits in his face, he doesn't retaliate... Just put that as an additional charge that the prosecutor will drop in exchange for a plea.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we're asking cops to do everything all the time now... In addition to protecting us, and bringing in the bad guys, and finding them, we want them to use kid gloves and we've tied their hands over and over again. So we are getting exactly what WE deserve, a bitter police force, who feels that the people are not behind them, and thus they move from serving and protecting us to serving and protecting themselves. Congratulations everyone... you got the police force you deserve. You don't like it? Well further tying their hands, throwing them in jail, etc. is just gonna make it worse. Rock on, morons.