The car is following a process chosen by Mercedes' engineers (to go forward when the user presses the accelerator.) The newsfeed is likewise following a mechanistic process driven by user input (they wouldn't be showing misinformation if users weren't uploading and sharing them.)
Shouldn't all sites have some kind of bandwidth / cost limiting in place? Not to say that AI crawlers shouldn't be more careful, but there are always malicious actors on the internet, seems foolish not to have some kind of defense in place
Nope. Assume you have insurance with a one-time fee of $X. It insures against a single kind of event that happens with 60% probability, and pays out $1.6X. So the majority of people are likely to have the event happen to them. The EV of the cost to the insurer is then $1.6X * 0.6 = $0.96X, so the books are expected to balance.
Obviously I'm ignoring variance in this calculation, but you can easily adjust the numbers to give a margin of safety.
> People can develop allergies during their lifetime, it's not just something that you're born with.
Sure, but the likelihood of that is low enough that insuring against that isn't worth it for most people
> But my message was about the general principle of insurance being the very thing your comment was against. The situation where the vast majority of people pay some cost of which only a few need to utilise.
No, the principle of insurance is that people pay to hedge against some event that has a reasonable likelihood of happening to them at some point. Whether it's a majority or a minority paying for it is not central to the concept of insurance.
I think one difference is that there isn't a great alternative option in the case of commercial buildings -- if you have a job in a given building that doesn't accommodate your disability, you can't just go find a different building. But insofar as food is concerned, you could pay more for more carefully-manufactured food, or just cook for yourself
Increased precision typically costs more economically, so I think it's a pretty good analogy... precise physical measurements require specialized equipment, precise floating-point calculations require more computational power, etc
Housing would depreciate too if we didn't have artificial scarcity policies designed to make it an investment. Saying that housing should be an investment because we've designed it to be an investment is circular reasoning.
Re #2: it's obvious that most people aren't the most objective when it comes to their offspring. That's why we should have policies that discourage overallocating resources to an unqualified child of a rich parent.
Finally, "personal property" is a construct of law. Something is yours because society has decided it's yours. If the laws change, and if you can't physically defend your property, then it's not really yours any more, is it?
Uh, none of that means housing has to be an investment. The point of a mortgage is that it helps you buy a house and pay it off over time, nothing more. We don't talk about cars being an investment just because people take out 7-year auto loans.
Moreover, passing on generational wealth shouldn't be a feature we want to make easier. You don't want a to push society in the direction where generational wealth is required to live a good life.