travisluis

Joined 9 years ago

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Aug 8

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I too miss the dew point feature. The best replacement for Dark Sky I've found is this 10-day view of Weather Underground that's unfortunately only available on their website—I just bookmark the website on my phone home screen. https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/austin/30.27,-97...

Comment · 3 years ago

Private policing predates public policing,[0] and so asserting that this is is a new development is not really correct. The same is true, incidentally, of firefighting: private insurance companies formed their own private brigades to protect their policyholders' property.[1] Lots of things that we tend to think of as "naturally" public services have only very recently taken that form.

[0] See p. 1193 et seq. of this article: https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/fi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#Early_...

Comment · 3 years ago

> And the insurance market.

No. Insurance is subject to the "insurable interest" doctrine, which generally prohibits using insurance as naked speculation. There are also far more backstops, reserve requirements, government guarantees, etc., designed to prevent this kind of implosion. Not saying it doesn't happen, but we've had since the South Sea Bubble to learn how to regulate insurance to prevent this kind of thing.

The key difference is that insurance is generally regulated from a consumer protection perspective, since many insurance lines are sold directly to unsophisticated consumers. CDSs are, by contrast, sold primarily these days to sophisticated financial speculators, who are presumably fully aware of the kinds of risk involved.