But the entire point is that if you don’t find the cause and simply charge based on correlations, you’re going to be unfairly overcharging some people and undercharging others.

Consider the discount you get for auto insurance if you’re married. I didn’t change my driving styles one lick when I got married. But my…

I guarantee you none of these people care about causation - only correlation. They don’t know the difference. These aren’t mathematical geniuses we’re talking about. 

If you want to price insurance based on the risk that the individual actually represents, then you have to dig into what the real causes of risk are. The argument is that education and occupation, while they may correlate to risk, aren’t actually the real drivers. I was simply providing a hypothetical to help people…

I don’t think you’ll find many people arguing that self-driving trucks wouldn’t be a significant game-changer for many industries.

But to assume that Tesla, who has never shown an ability to profit from anything, would be able to succeed in this market and won’t simply get squashed by every major player is a bit of a…

1) There is NOTHING false about it. If you understood a thing about how taxes work, you’d know that the AMT only takes effect if your taxes are below certain threshold rates. If you take away the AMT but keep the deductions (like the house bill did), your taxes fall to what they were without the AMT in place - in…

I think the bigger question is not so much if there is a correlation, but if you are looking at enough variables to find the strongest possible mapping function between characteristics of the insured and the expected claims.

For example, let’s make up an imaginary disease called crashitis that happened to only affect…

There’s a big difference between Amazon and Tesla, though.

Amazon has consistently looked for new business plays that they’re willing to accept short-term losses on. Whenever they stop expanding into new markets, they come back into the black very quickly. They’ve proven that they can fund these expansions and that…

“they’re still here, and still making progress.”

If progress is defined by growing losses and cash burn.

They’ve been on the losing side - but there’s no rational justification for Tesla being valued anywhere near where they are. They aren’t profitable, have never been profitable, and are showing no signs of being profitable. On the contrary, they’re doing an outstanding job of burning cash and diluting shareholder…

Although I hate the large screens, I actually prefer the Tesla interior - I like clean lines and not this mishmash of shapes in the Audi...

“To put it simply, short selling is a practice where you take out a loan of shares from a certain company with the promise that you’ll buy those shares back for whatever they’re worth in the near future. The hope is that the share will be worth less when it comes time for you to buy them back so that you have a net…

You didn’t do much research at all on it.

Nope - hate to break it to you, but Trump’s tax rate in 2005 would have been 3% with the house bill. NOT a cut of 3%.

He claimed an income of roughly $150 million in 2005, and paid $38 million in taxes, an effective rate of 25.3%. But without the AMT, he would have only paid $5 million in income taxes, a 3.33%…

You have to look further than tax rates and itemized deductions.

Reduced corporate taxes feeding higher dividends and stock buybacks boosts the income of the wealthy, but they’ll only get taxed at much lower cap gains and dividend taxes on that.

And then there’s the pass-through entity income tax cut - if you aren’t…

Oh, you’ll still get that.

And most likely if you can take that private plane to your home in the virgin islands, you’ll be able to exclude 90% of your income from taxes (they actually put that bullshit in their bill)

“I would argue that it isn’t that drastic for the “wealthy” but does double the standard deduction for all of us pleebs.”

Except that it doesn’t really, and you lose the value of that deduction elsewhere.

Consider that the current standard deduction is $12,700 for a married couple. Their bills both move that to…

Those Escorts were extremely reliable - actual problem rates were better than the Camry of the day...

They were just ungodly basic for too many people. Get over the lack of anything and general rough fit-and-finish and you were actually looking at reliable vehicle - people just wouldn’t buy that message when it…

Did a google search for the VIN for my old Taurus.

Nothing bad popped up. Did get an address, though. Popped it into Google maps, and I find this... nearly 21 freakin’ years after it rolled off the assembly line and the paint still shines.

Ask Consumer Reports -

Their primary beef with Ford has been the MyFordTouch system for years. Apart from that, they’ve had very few actual issues to report. But that doesn’t stop them from trashing the entire brand and calling them below average for reliability just because the optional infotainment system was…

“In terms of autonomy, Ford is still behind GM, which launched its Super Cruise system in select Cadillac cars earlier this year. It needs to make up for that lost ground and quick.”

Are they really, though? There’s a big difference between being behind in technology and being behind in the market. GM may have…