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A lot of Americans are underinsured because of genuine hardship, and suffer more than their wealthier counterparts do from uncompensated losses. But lower-income people also suffer disproportionately if coverage isn’t available at all.

In California, insurance companies are prohibited from using statistical modeling to assess future fire risks when setting rates; premium increases must be based on insurers’ loss history, not on the growing likelihood of serious fires.

Jesse Keenan, a Tulane University urban-planning professor who studies climate change and the built environment, expresses some frustration with consumer advocates who view the rising cost of coverage as a “power play” by the industry. “It often is,” he told me. “But what [advocates] don’t acknowledge is the culpability of a lot of different actors—local governments that do not strengthen land and zoning use, state legislators who pass laws making it harder to place obligations on homeowners, and a federal government that writes big, unconditional checks. So there is a lot of blame to go around.”

Pesci and Tomei, on the other hand, create a quirky relationship that I liked. Neither one is played as a dummy. They're smart, in their own ways, but involved in a legal enterprise they are completely unprepared for. Tomei's surprise appearance as an expert witness is a high point, and left me feeling I would like to see this couple again. Maybe in a screenplay that was more focused.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

And so Haigh, in rather overt terms, slowly begins to recontextualize Adam’s sexuality as more of a conduit for his despondency than a root cause, leveraging a personal story about the consequences of keeping pain out into a primordial one about the catharsis of letting it in

“All of Us Strangers” does too, and it never shies away from how hard it can be to start again, especially once Harry begins to struggle with his own advice

If you are using emotionally independent language, it may trigger some insecurities in the other person who may think that you aren’t as interested or invested in the relationship. It may be helpful to let the other person know that you are working on your emotional reactivity and trying out new approaches, to help minimize the potential perceived threat on their end.

Becoming emotionally independent can be a challenging journey, although there are numerous potential benefits to reclaiming your own needs and desires and decreasing your emotional reactivity to other people (i.e., managing your own insecurities or unproductive relationship expectations).

By engaging in self-soothing strategies prior to starting the conversation, you can begin to neutralize your anxiety so that you don’t start the conversation prematurely in an emotionally reactive way. You want to be able to hear what your loved one is saying to you without reacting from a place of fear, sadness, or anger. This is part of creating emotional independence. The objective is to create some distance between you and your loved one so that you can understand their experience independent of it being seen as a reflection of your value or the stability of your relationship.

Inboxes only let us Close open loops if they’re reliable—that is, if you can add something to it with total confidence that it’ll get “handled” in some reasonable timeframe. “Handled” is fuzzy: you just need to feel that the fate of those items roughly reflects your true preferences. You’ll trust an inbox system which ends up dropping 90% of items if the other 10% were the only ones you really cared about. You won’t trust an inbox system in which 90% of tasks get done, but the 10% which don’t get done are the ones you really cared about.In efficient inboxes, it may be easy to maintain this kind of confidence: the departure naturally rate exceeds the arrival rate. But most knowledge worker inboxes don’t look like this. The rates are highly variable, which creates bottlenecks. Not every item actually needs to get handled, but people are over-optimistic, so items accrue in a backlog.

“Come right off ‘Fury,’ right? I had the town in my hand — could’ve done anything, and I did do anything,” Ayer continued. “And [I] go on this journey with [‘Suicide Squad’]. And the same thing — authentic, truthful, let’s do all the rehearsal, let’s really get in each other’s souls. Let’s create this amazing, collaborative thing, right? And then ‘Deadpool’ opened, right? And they never tested ‘Batman v. Superman,’ so they were expecting a different result, and then they got hammered by all the critics. Then it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re going to turn David Ayer’s dark, soulful movie into a fucking comedy now.’”

The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead.

As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.

Part of the reason even productive bubbles are wasteful is that it’s incredibly difficult to find “killer applications” for novel technology. For example, one early use case for the telephone was listening to music; meanwhile, radios only embraced broadcast after World War I. It may take decades for innovation to find its ideal implementation.

Critical race theory is a broad set of ideas about systemic bias and privilege. The theory, which has existed in academia for decades, holds that racism is part of a broader pattern in America: It is woven into laws, and it shows up in who gets a job interview, the sorts of home loans people are offered, how they are treated by police, and other facets of daily life large and small

Games are rapidly becoming the greatest drivers of entertainment, the nexus for social media, and cultural landmarks

First, and this is the default, they’re saying no because they just don’t like it. They have their own opinion of how this should be done and don’t want outsiders making them change it. Quite possibly they already considered your plan and decided against it. The new policy is probably awkward, annoying and inconvenient, and will cost money (even if it’s not explicitly aimed at profits). It’s a pain in the arse. However, it is also possible, and not actually a big deal, and in the end it won’t really damage the product or the company. They can do it - they just don’t like it.

In the end, it doesn’t actually matter much, and life goes on. ‘No’ just means ‘that’s annoying’.

Second, though, the tech industry (or the doctors, or the farmers) might be saying no because this really will have very serious negative consequences that you haven’t understood. My favourite example is California’s 2019 ‘AB5’ law. This aimed to classify ‘gig economy’ workers, especially (and deliberately) Uber drivers, as employees, with access to healthcare. This might or might not be a good policy objective (reasonable people can debate this), but the law itself was drafted so ineptly that it effectively made anyone who did any freelance work an employee, and hence in turn effectively banned freelance work. There followed a desperate scramble to exempt over 100 professions, from doctors to truck drivers to hairdressers, before the whole thing had to be abandoned.

the third kind is ‘we actually can’t do that’. The perennial example here, of course, is encryption. For the last 25 years, engineers have said ‘we can make it secure, or we can let law enforcement have access, but that means the Chinese can get in too” and politicians reply “no, make secure but not for people we like”.

My old boss Marc Andreessen, back when he was on the internet, liked to call this the ‘nerd harder’ argument. The engineer says not “I don’t want to” nor “that’s a bad idea” but “I genuinely have no idea how to do that even if I wanted to” and the policy-maker replies “you’re an engineer - work it out!” “Work it out” is generally a demand to invent new mathematics, but sadly, mathematics doesn’t work like that. Your MPs’ WhatsApp group can be secure, or it can readable by law enforcement and the Chinese, but you cannot have encryption that can be broken only by our spies and not their spies. Pick one.

The policy class that got their staff to print their emails will age out and be replaced by the generation that grew up sending emojis, and understands that tech policy is just as nuanced, complex and full of trade-offs as healthcare, transport or housing policy.

A person can’t mimic another voice perfectly (impressionists don’t have to pay licence fees) but they can listen to a thousand hours of music and make something in that style - a ‘pastiche’, we sometimes call it. If a person did that, they wouldn’t have to pay a fee to all those artists, so if we use a computer for that, do we need to pay them?

I think most people understand that if I post a link to a news story on my Facebook feed and tell my friends to read it, it’s absurd for the newspaper to demand payment for this. A newspaper, indeed, doesn’t pay a restaurant a percentage when it writes a review.

one way to think about this might be that AI makes practical at a massive scale things that were previously only possible on a small scale. This might be the difference between the police carrying wanted pictures in their pockets and the police putting face recognition cameras on every street corner - a difference in scale can be a difference in principle. What outcomes do we want? What do we want the law to be? What can it be?

OpenAI hasn’t ‘pirated’ your book or your story in the sense that we normally use that word, and it isn’t handing it out for free. Indeed, it doesn’t need that one novel in particular at all. In Tim O’Reilly’s great phrase, data isn’t oil; data is sand. It’s only valuable in the aggregate of billions,, and your novel or song or article is just one grain of dust in the Great Pyramid.

it’s supposed to be inferring ‘intelligence’ (a placeholder word) from seeing as much as possible of how people talk, as a proxy for how they think.

it doesn’t need your book or website in particular and doesn’t care what you in particular wrote about, but it does need ‘all’ the books and ‘all’ the websites. It would work if one company removed its content, but not if everyone did.

What if I use an engine trained on the last 50 years of music to make something that sounds entirely new and original? No-one should be under the delusion that this won’t happen.

I can buy the same camera as Cartier-Bresson, and I can press the button and make a picture without being able to draw or paint, but that’s not what makes the artist - photography is about where you point the camera, what image you see and which you choose. No-one claims a machine made the image.

Spotify already has huge numbers of ‘white noise’ tracks and similar, gaming the recommendation algorithm and getting the same payout per play as Taylor Swift or the Rolling Stones. If we really can make ‘music in the style of the last decade’s hits,’ how much of that will there be, and how will we wade through it? How will we find the good stuff, and how will we define that? Will we care?

Adaptation inconsistencies could be waved away if the emotional terrain and aesthetics of the film had a strong enough point of view

Both Trump and Carlson "were children of privilege" who "sought the respect of the establishment" but never got it. And, like Trump, he found success "by catering to people who despised the world that had spurned him."

Throw a dart at any show on the calendar and you will hit an absurdity. Carlson once said vaccine requirements in the military were used to “identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anybody else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately.” He called January 6 rioters “orderly and meek," trying to reframe them as "sightseers.”

In dozens of interviews with families I heard about doctors shaming low-income moms for buying dollar store ramen noodles instead of pricier fresh vegetables. I talked to teenagers who were gaining weight while dealing with depression or anxiety and whose doctors told them to cut carbs. Families described doctors who rushed conversations, grabbed bellies or made jokes about kids’ bodies.

What should the obesity guidelines say instead? Stop classifying kids and their health by body size altogether. This would involve a paradigm shift to weight-inclusive approaches, which see weight change as a possible symptom of, or a contributing factor toward, a larger health concern or struggle. These approaches focus providers on addressing that issue rather than managing weight loss. This means looking less at the number on the scale and talking more to families about their health priorities and challenges. Can they add healthy foods rather than restrict calories?

We cannot solve anti-fat bias by making fat kids thin. Our current approach only teaches them that trusted adults believe the bullies are right — that a fat body is just a problem to solve. That’s not where the conversation about anyone’s health should begin.

Throughout the series, Amy frantically maneuvers to sell her plant business, Kōyōhaus, to Jordan Forster (Maria Bello), CEO of a big-box chain and casually obnoxious Asia-phile. Through Jordan and Amy’s various interactions, it is apparent that Jordan sees Amy as an Asian plaything to be acquired alongside her business—from the constant stream of racially-inflected quips, to overly-familiar touching. But on Amy’s part, she seems to have constructed both her business and personal brand for maximum appeal to the kind of white person that carries an orientalist appetite.

It doesn’t escape me that Japanese culture has long been fetishized in the West as being the upper echelon of Asian refinement. Kōyōhaus is Asianesque without cultural substance, engineered to let consumers feel cultured simply through a purchase, not unlike Jordan herself, who is willing to pay $150,000 to buy a chair from Amy called “tamago” (Japanese for “egg”) without even bothering to learn how to pronounce it correctly.

It would be foolish to try to forbid Wikipedia contributors from using chatbots to help write articles: people would use them anyway, but would try to hide the fact. A ban would also be counterproductive. LLMs are simply tools, just like computers, and the real issue is not whether to use them, but how to use them properly.

While open access is a cornerstone of Wikipedia’s design principles, some worry the unrestricted scraping of internet data allows AI companies like OpenAI to exploit the open web to create closed commercial datasets for their models. This is especially a problem if the Wikipedia content itself is AI-generated, creating a feedback loop of potentially biased information, if left unchecked.

But that central conflict between siblings, stemming from being raised as attack dogs always poised to bite each other, never wavered. It's what ultimately lost them Waystar, and what ultimately eroded their souls.

There’s a consistency to the moral universe of this series, and in this finale, one pattern holds true: Those who deny their true selves will be punished, while those who endure the pain of seeing themselves with clear eyes will be shown mercy.

Companies above a certain size become too big to fail and too big to jail. They capture their regulators and ensure that any damages the government extracts are less than their profits – a fine is a price. Juries, on the other hand, can and do really whack a company for its bad conduct. They understand that incentives matter. They understand that a company that saves $1,000,001 by cutting back on workplace safety can't be driven to improve its behavior by a fine of $1,000,000 after it kills a bunch of workers. If profit outstrips penalties, penalties aren't effective.

Medieval courts called this champerty; today, we call it litigation finance: investing in other peoples' grievances against deep-pocketed monsters, in the expectation of reaping huge cash payouts. On paper, litigation finance seems like a neat solution to a messy problem. The bigger a company is, the worse the abuses it commits – and the more it can be made to pay for its sins.

Litigation finance is a large and growing chunk of the finance sector. For about a decade, hedge funds and private equity have been bankrolling law-firms that represent people who've been mangled by corporations, keeping the money flowing through whatever delays and entanglements the target throws up

While a local lawyer can make a tidy living going after slip-and-falls and fender-benders, splitting the proceeds with their clients, a firm backed by a huge investment fund can do the same to companies with billions in the bank and hundreds of millions on the line.

So, the real story isn't: "Old lady spills coffee and gets millions." It's "McDonald's ignores hundreds of dangerous incidents for years, then maims a customer for life and refuses to pay her medical bills or change its practices to avoid future incidents. A judge says she's due a fraction of the jury award, but she doesn't get it because McDonald's uses its massive litigation war-chest to force her into a confidential settlement."

The "bloodsucking lawyers preying on innocent corporations" story is a creation of the business lobby, which has, for decades, argued that it should be immune to legal consequences when it harms or kills the public. The cause of "tort reform" is, in actuality, a corporate charter of impunity.