The word used was "teenager," not "child." Someone who is 19 is still a teenager, since the number ends with the suffix "teen."

If it was coercion into physical sexual contact between the blackmailer and the victim, it would be rape. That's not what happened. Rape requires actual physical contact between the perpetrator and the victim. Anything else is not rape, and attempting to redefine the word strictly for shock factor is intellectual fraud.

I've never met a creative hipster. Hipster culture is just a giant circle jerk of conformity to yet another arbitrary set of social rules.

>$$$$$= lose your customers to a company that had neutral actuaries. Unless you wish to provide evidence of complete marketplace collusion between every single insurer covering a given type of property. No? Didn't think so...

That's the problem so many whiners miss in this thread. It requires collusion to "raise rates and make more profit, muahaha."

Except insurance premiums won't cover the actual losses. Insurers only make money when the premium averages exceed loss payouts. That's why they typically absolutely refuse to cover certain circumstances. When the actual average risk of loss outweighs the area's premiums, it's a fundamentally stupid idea to cover those areas.

It requires all insurers to raise their rates to the same level. If some overestimate for the same level of coverage, it's pretty easy to switch insurers and save a ton on premiums. That means fewer dollars to the companies raising their rates.

Again, for your statement to be true, every single insurer who provides a specific type and level of insurance must raise their rates at the same time.

All areas have disasters. It's pretty easy to tell that building on a mountain in California where dozens of houses have collapsed from unstable geology defines "bad place to build." So does building on a coast which is actively eroding, or building within a 10-year-average flood plain.

There are eminently "good" places to build, in that they are not almost guaranteed to be destroyed by predictable (in the average, not in specifics) natural phenomenon.

The warming is at the poles at the very least. For the first time in recorded history there existed an open-water path between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Yes, those events have happened and continue to happen. The quantity and severity averages, however, have changed.

People are typically denied payout on coverages because they don't understand the policies for which they are paying. Otherwise they leave themselves open to class action lawsuits.

The Arab-Israeli conflict started 30 years before Israel existed as a state?

"Terrorism" has been turned into a convenient buzzword. It's only applied to those the person using it disagrees with. The Syrian insurgency most certainly does have terrorist aspects. The American Revolution had terrorist aspects as well. If I were fighting as an insurgent, you can bet your ass I'd target civilian installations supportive of the regime against which I was fighting. It's eminently practical on a strategic level, and is one of the most effective tactics in a lop-sided conflict.

Exactly. There are really no realistic military threats to the US. The real threats are economic, and the US is becoming increasingly likely to fall under those economic threats due to the outsourcing of pretty much everything but services which absolutely require domestic workers.

It's good to make the data interception as expensive as possible though.

A lot.