Author Topic: Simone Giertz  (Read 15362 times)

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Offline ttelectronic

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #50 on: July 18, 2018, 11:48:22 pm »
That chart doesn't have enough information to say. Is that for liability only coverage? Does it cover your own vehicle too? How high is the limit to the coverage? Does it matter what kind of car you drive or what your driving record is like?

For reference I pay about $50/month for liability and personal injury protection on a 34 year old car with a squeaky clean record. While I dislike insurance companies rather intensely I still have less issue with that being a for-profit business than medical care. I can choose not to drive a car if it really comes down to it and it won't kill me. The way the health insurance is now I'm required to have it *and* it's provided by for-profit corporations with absolutely no cost controls.
Sorry, that is medical per month. Car insurance, varies, full coverage for our four door hatch I think sits around  1200 a year for us. It was just ironic that that car insurance was brought up, which is also a goverment insurance here.  :D
« Last Edit: July 18, 2018, 11:50:10 pm by ttelectronic »
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #51 on: July 18, 2018, 11:50:57 pm »
well she did say in the video she is under insurance, and it is quite a list of procedures it covered. but as i understood what insurance is, after 232k "spent", i bet she will now need to pay more insurance. or worse, will they no longer allow her to renew?

It depends on the insurance. For a while under the ACA an insurance company couldn't just drop you once you've actually tried to use them. Trump has been hell bent on dismantling that and other protections but I have not really followed what the current state of things are there. I just hope that some day we can catch up to the rest of the world and get a universal single payer system that covers at least the basics. We already pay way more than anyone else and what we have is terrible.
 
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Offline EEVblog

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #52 on: July 19, 2018, 12:11:21 am »
To make an analogy, why should a driver who has had a spotless driving record for 10 years pay as much for car insurance as someone who regularly runs red lights, drives way above the speed limit, and has been in several serious accidents in the last 10 years?

Here that's called "no claim bonus". You get a discounted rate if you haven't had an accident for 5 years.
 
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Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #53 on: July 19, 2018, 01:20:51 am »
The problem is that those who live an unhealthy lifestyle unfairly take more from the system than those who live a healthy lifestyle, thus raising cost for everyone. Taxing junk food is one way to try to level that. Note that I'm not biased against those who incur large medical costs due to misfortune like what happened to Simone - just those who got into it through bad choices of their own.

To make an analogy, why should a driver who has had a spotless driving record for 10 years pay as much for car insurance as someone who regularly runs red lights, drives way above the speed limit, and has been in several serious accidents in the last 10 years?
This isn't true, as I've explained in one of my previous posts. If you check the numbers you'll see that people growing old and frail are a lot more expensive than unhealthy people. Those tend to have short sick beds and die after a relatively small amount of treatment. Smokers are for example a lot cheaper than people with a very healthy lifestyle. Of course, you can't exactly punish a good lifestyle.

Besides, treating people differently is a minefield. It can only lead to tales of sorrow for a vast array of reasons. One example would be that it's inevitable that lower income people will be less capable of exercising in an organised manner, or buying healthy foods. They'll be punished financially for having less means. Another example would be that you'd need to grade all kinds of behaviour present and past. It means giving up a lot of privacy and having a detailed track record dating back for decades. And who will grade the behaviour and all the complex interactions between factors? Surely not not insurers? Or other institutions or organisations with an inevitable own agenda?

Why should people be treated and pay the same? Because your reward for a healthy lifestyle us a longer and happier life, not a discount. If you need a financial incentive to take care of yourself you really need a long hard look at your priorities.
 
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Offline Bassman59

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #54 on: July 19, 2018, 01:25:44 am »
To make an analogy, why should a driver who has had a spotless driving record for 10 years pay as much for car insurance as someone who regularly runs red lights, drives way above the speed limit, and has been in several serious accidents in the last 10 years?

Here that's called "no claim bonus". You get a discounted rate if you haven't had an accident for 5 years.
My (US-based) auto insurance policy has such a discount, too, called a "Premier Driver Discount." My guess is that all of the main-line (not economy/high-risk-pool) insurers have such a discount. I think it's all marketing, though. Instead of saying "BAD DRIVER SURCHARGE: $150," they say "GOOD DRIVER DISCOUNT: $150" and it's supposed to make you feel better.

Oddly, the policy has a "New Vehicle Discount." "Private passenger vehicles that are 3 years old or newer receive a discount. The discount percent decreases as the vehicle ages." I wonder why they offer this? A newer vehicle costs more to replace.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2018, 01:29:45 am by Bassman59 »
 

Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #55 on: July 19, 2018, 01:27:50 am »
Here that's called "no claim bonus". You get a discounted rate if you haven't had an accident for 5 years.
Of course insurers all over the world are now trying to get everyone to drive around with a black box to get a discount. Brake too hard or turn too aggressively and you lose money. It's not difficult to imagine a situation where that has become the new normal and protecting your privacy costs you money for not "voluntarily" participating.

Of course, your driving style isn't very relevant but the actual consequences are. A no claim bonus already takes this into account wonderfully, but that doesn't seem to stop the black box from being introduced in various permutations.
 

Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #56 on: July 19, 2018, 01:37:12 am »
My (US-based) auto insurance policy has such a discount, too, called a "Premier Driver Discount." My guess is that all of the main-line (not economy/high-risk-pool) insurers have such a discount. I think it's all marketing, though. Instead of saying "BAD DRIVER SURCHARGE: $150," they say "GOOD DRIVER DISCOUNT: $150" and it's supposed to make you feel better.

Oddly, the policy has a "New Vehicle Discount." "Private passenger vehicles that are 3 years old or newer receive a discount. The discount percent decreases as the vehicle ages." I wonder why they offer this? A newer vehicle costs more to replace.
Insurers are really good at one thing and that's statistics. Their numbers apparently tell them that newer cars are driven more safely, which makes sense. They are probably also less likely to cause serious physical harm to the driver or others. They need to make sure the house always wins, so you can bet they have a fine grained understanding of the historical numbers and base their current pricing on it.

Another thing it could be is some government incentive to stimulate the sales of cars, a bit like how "green" vehicles are discounted or subsidised in a lot of places.
 

Online NiHaoMike

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #57 on: July 19, 2018, 01:46:42 am »
Besides, treating people differently is a minefield. It can only lead to tales of sorrow for a vast array of reasons. One example would be that it's inevitable that lower income people will be less capable of exercising in an organised manner, or buying healthy foods. They'll be punished financially for having less means. Another example would be that you'd need to grade all kinds of behaviour present and past. It means giving up a lot of privacy and having a detailed track record dating back for decades. And who will grade the behaviour and all the complex interactions between factors? Surely not not insurers? Or other institutions or organisations with an inevitable own agenda?
Hence the idea of taxing junk food to subsidize healthcare, so that those who eat excessive amounts of junk food end up paying more for healthcare. It only covers one aspect of a healthy/unhealthy lifestyle but it's one that's easy to implement. Or maybe it would work better to subsidize fruits and vegetables...
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Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #58 on: July 19, 2018, 02:06:50 am »
Hence the idea of taxing junk food to subsidize healthcare, so that those who eat excessive amounts of junk food end up paying more for healthcare. It only covers one aspect of a healthy/unhealthy lifestyle but it's one that's easy to implement. Or maybe it would work better to subsidize fruits and vegetables...
Junk food tends to be cheaper than healthy alternatives in the US. It'd boil down to taxing the poorest. If fair treatment is the goal, that doesn't seem to be it.
 

Online NiHaoMike

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #59 on: July 19, 2018, 02:33:45 am »
So maybe the idea of taxing junk food in order to subsidize healthy food for the poor would be the best.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #60 on: July 19, 2018, 04:53:33 am »
It's not so much that junk food is cheaper overall, but junk food is the stuff that is resilient enough to sit around on store shelves in prepared form. If you have even the most basic cooking skills you can eat reasonably well for just a few dollars a day. I'm always shocked whenever I encounter someone who insists they "can't cook", and finds all sorts of excuses why. You don't have to be a master chef to prepare a decent meal, anyone with at least two brain cells can make a sandwich, bake a potato or boil pasta. When I was broke after buying my house, I practically lived for a while off tuna sandwiches using bread I made in my thrift store bread machine. It was less than $2 a day for 3 meals, and that was back in 2004 so it's not like I'm quoting 1960s prices.
 
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Offline mtdoc

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #61 on: July 19, 2018, 06:12:20 am »
When it come to blaming people for their poor health, I would put obesity near the bottom of the list. Obesity has a strong genetically determined component. Whether you accept the “Thrifty Gene” or the “Drifty Gene” hypothesis, evolution clearly favored the tendency of some to store any excess available calories as fat.

It doesn’t help that so much food industry resources are devoted to developing and promoting foods which trigger this behavioral and physiologic response. It’s no accident that “junk food” is so addictive and so unhealthy.

Smoking on the other hand is, at least initially, a choice one makes which has clear adverse health effects. Taxing of tobacco products and devoting resources to prevention and treatment of nicotine addiction can’t go far enough IMO.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2018, 06:19:01 am by mtdoc »
 
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Online NiHaoMike

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #62 on: July 19, 2018, 02:57:24 pm »
Obesity is not the only problem junk food causes. Excessive refined sugar causes diabetes and many additives are thought to contribute to cancer. And the processed food industry is very unethical.
https://foodbabe.com/the-food-industry-needs-to-stop-treating-us-like-a-bunch-of-idiots/
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Offline james_s

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #63 on: July 19, 2018, 04:01:06 pm »
As soon as someone quotes anything from foodbabe I immediately have trouble taking anything they say seriously. That woman is a self serving nitwit.
 
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Online NiHaoMike

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #64 on: July 19, 2018, 04:47:05 pm »
Only the ones involved in making and selling junk food would disagree on the additives being bad.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #65 on: July 19, 2018, 04:54:23 pm »
Which additives exactly? What specific harm does each of these additives cause? How do you know this? I would like some detail here, not simply "additives are bad!"

I recall she was one of those people going around stating that ingredients that have difficult to pronounce scientific names are unhealthy. An apple contains chemical compounds with difficult to pronounce scientific names, it's a meaningless metric.

I have no ties to the food industry whatsoever.
 

Online Marco

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #66 on: July 19, 2018, 06:05:06 pm »
Trump has been hell bent on dismantling that and other protections but I have not really followed what the current state of things are there.
The federal individual mandate is ending, meaning more healthy people will chose old style off exchange insurance (pre-condition limited, capped payout) or no insurance. Which will probably make Obamacare completely unaffordable for anyone not getting it fully subsidized outside of states with their own individual mandate.
Which additives exactly?
It's hard to say, but we do know there's something in the environment causing massive increases in autism, auto-immune diseases, allergies and infertility. Processed food, pesticides, leaching plastic, blowing agents and vaccines are all prime suspects. Probably some synergistic effect of the lot of them.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2018, 06:13:28 pm by Marco »
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #67 on: July 19, 2018, 06:35:22 pm »
It's hard to say, but we do know there's something in the environment causing massive increases in autism, auto-immune diseases, allergies and infertility. Processed food, pesticides, leaching plastic, blowing agents and vaccines are all prime suspects. Probably some synergistic effect of the lot of them.

Do we know this?

I don't know as much about some of these things as others, but looking at autism specifically we have seen a massive increase in *diagnosis* of autism and autistic spectrum disorders. Whether there is actually a significant increase in the occurrence of autism is difficult to say as historically many people now diagnosed as autistic would have simply been called retarded, weird, eccentric, etc. Quite a few well known scientists, inventors and engineers exhibited traits that today suggest autism. The fact that we didn't have a specific name for something doesn't mean it didn't exist at the time.

Now that's not to say that there isn't something, or as you suggest, a collection of things in the environment that are detrimental to our health, but it's important to not confuse an increase in diagnosis along with the fact that people on average are living much longer than they used to, exposing conditions that previously would have been masked by other causes of death, with an increase in occurrence.
 
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Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #68 on: July 19, 2018, 07:28:42 pm »
Really, the vaccines and autism thing again?  :palm: Regardless, the alternative isn't as attractive.

 
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Online NiHaoMike

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #69 on: July 19, 2018, 07:37:32 pm »
I think the controversy with vaccines is that some of the newer ones haven't been adequately tested for safety. Of course, many end up generalizing that to say all vaccines are bad... I think the solution would be to have independent testing.

Massively cutting down on food additives shouldn't be too disagreeable, however. They serve no good for those consuming the product.
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Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #70 on: July 19, 2018, 08:34:36 pm »
newer ones haven't been adequately tested for safety.

Bullshit.

This line and a thousand equally weak lines are parroted by these imbeciles daily.  They aren't interested in the facts, they won't provide any support for their claims.  They certainly won't hear any facts that go against their belief.

If anything, the FDA (and similar organizations the world over) are too restrictive.  There have been several instances of treatments showing remarkable effect in trials, going through too many years too late for hundreds of victims.  [No, I don't have any particular examples handy.  Please, do take the time to research things yourself.]

But there have also been cases where treatments were pushed through trials too aggressively, or without enough oversight, and participants died avoidable deaths.

An interesting argument (for those that are willing to hear and understand arguments), is this: how much vaccination is too much?  No vaccine is perfect, and there will always be side effects, including extreme effects like death.  Likewise, at some point, herd immunity is high enough that we don't have to vaccinate any more than that.  Right?  Sounds perfectly reasonable.

As it turns out, there is such a threshold.  What is it?  It's 99.99something percent!  There is no single community on the planet which has vaccinated enough to cover all diseases to this level of protection!  It seems we cannot possibly vaccinate enough.  And this is the most devastating part of all, about the stupid anti-vaxxers: they willingly encourage people to become victims, to die of utterly preventable diseases, or to be crippled by lifelong effects (polio, anyone?).

I have no qualms about using epithets like imbecile, or stupid.  These adjectives are not slanderous.  They are simple statements of fact, rationally and morally justified.

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Offline james_s

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #71 on: July 19, 2018, 11:15:19 pm »
The thing that baffles me most about the anti-vax thing is that what's her name, the ex Playboy model has so much clout, despite the fact that she has absolutely no background or education in medicine or science. There is a strange phenomenon that occasionally leads large numbers of people to stand behind someone as an authority on a matter for which they are utterly unqualified for. People are allowed to have opinions, but if you start stating something as fact then I expect you to have solid data to back it up. If it is contrary to what the overwhelming majority of people who are true experts on the matter are saying, then my standards for data countering this are that much higher.

The same is true of "foodbabe", absolutely no medical or scientific background, she's just an ordinary person with an opinion. The only thing that makes her any different than any other schmuck off the street is that she is (subjectively) an attractive woman. I guess people like hearing attractive people saying what they want to hear? I don't know but it's strange. It's closer to a religion than to science. She makes a ton of money by promoting her bullshit though, which ironically is one of the main arguments she uses to try to discredit anyone who speaks out against her. 
 

Offline Mr. Scram

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #72 on: July 19, 2018, 11:16:11 pm »
Maybe we need to take the vaccine discussion somewhere else. I don't think this is the right place for it.
 
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Offline EEVblog

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #73 on: July 19, 2018, 11:59:16 pm »
Here that's called "no claim bonus". You get a discounted rate if you haven't had an accident for 5 years.
Of course insurers all over the world are now trying to get everyone to drive around with a black box to get a discount.

I have not heard of such a thing before. It's not here in Australia that I am aware of.
Some companies even offer no claim bonus "for life" once you reach that level. But you have to stay with them of course.
 

Offline EEVblog

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Re: Simone Giertz
« Reply #74 on: July 20, 2018, 12:50:07 am »
Please stop the stuff about food additives, vaccines etc, this is not the place.
 
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