insurance

co-op style

Gambling is a Bad Thing, so when someone described insureance as gambling I started to think and decided that there are two ways to look at insurance.

Insurance as a gamble: you buy insurance because something might go wrong and instead of maybe paying a large sum, you pay–for sure–a smaller sum. Essentially, you're gambling that something will go wrong.

Insurance as Capitalist-Communist Mashup: Given that calamity generally doesn't strike everyone at the same time, we all chip in a fixed amount of money on a regular basis. When problems occur, we dip into the kitty. Sometimes we're helping others and sometimes we're being helped.

If we look at it this way, insurance clearly isn't gambling. However, two questions remain: How do the insurers look at it? and How would a different point of view affect insurance policies?

I won't pretend to answer the first question, since anything I say will probably be too simplistic. Moving on to the second question, here's an idea for a new kind of insurance business: co-operative insurance.

In co-op insurance, the premium is not fixed. Every month, the total cost of claims approved is divided among the policy holders. If no claims are approved, no one pays more than the basic administration fee. In a month with a higher number of claims, everyone's premiums jump up.

The idea here is that the cost would be lower because the insurer is not being paid to take a risk. The uncertainty is spread across all the co-op policy holders, not concentrated in one insurance firm.

This is simply the germ of the idea. It would be interesting to flesh it out a little to see what it might look like in more detail. It would also be interesting to contrast it with Lloyds of London's insurance market.

At any rate, it's an idea that moves insurance away from gambling, and may even result in reduced costs.

severe

potential

as in "Have you heard the debut release from Mimico Molly? It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's got severe potential!"

Has anyone noticed that I like making up random phrases? aaahhh.....

"I deeply considered this

to find an explanation"

Our class received an email today for a professor who expressed his deepest admiration for us as well as his chagrined disappointment with our preformance in the final exam. After writing that he would bump the marks by about 20%, he concluded by saying...

The final grades will reflect my unchanged esteem towards you.

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Choice quote from (every single) lecture: "I remember to you..."

letter and numbers

information

Literacy and numeracy are generally considered to be fundamental skills. They are both general skills applicable in a million ways and places. Much of the early years of our education is devoted (or, was devoted–who knows what they're teaching kids now :) ) to learning to understand and manipulate letter and numbers.

Once we have learned how to handle data, we move on to learning to deal with information. Often, this is taught in a much more specific way than we are taught our letters and numbers. Instead of learning to deal with all kinds of information seperately, in english, biology, math and music class, might it not be better if we learned the basics of information handling in a general way and then applied it to each situation?

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Just for the record, this idea is half-baked. For starters, I don't even know what I mean by "the basics of information handling". Essentially, I've got a suspicion that things would be clearer if we were explict about the methods we use to write and interpret whatever information we are dealing with.

Functor!

the executionator!

(to the tune of Trogdor, the Burninator)

Functor was a function,
i mean, he was a object-function
uhhh, he was just an object

uh

but he was still
FUNCTOOAAARR!!!!

(with apologies to all non-geeks and homestarrunner.com)