Meanwhile, Here in the World of Actually Existing Capitalism

By -
Our insurance company was disputing with us about where we lived (Brooklyn or Pennsylvania). Finally, we seemed to convince the person on the phone that the car is in Pennsylvania enough of the time that we qualify for insurance there. We were all set -- we thought.

The next we heard from them, it was a notice saying our insurance had been cancelled -- for several months! So, we called to sort this out. The lady on the phone explained that it was the fault of vague notes taken during the previous conversation, and our insurance would be restored.

"So," she added, "what we'll do is give you retroactive coverage for the time you had no insurance, and you can pay for that."

"But why," I asked, "do I need retroactive coverage, when I think there is little chance I will have a retroactive accident?"

"Well, otherwise, you'd have a break in coverage, and we'd have to charge you a lot more to restore your coverage."

"You mean, because you accidentally cancelled my coverage, I will have to pay a lot to have it restored, unless I now pay you for the time you weren't actually covering me?"

"Yes, that's right."

Ah, sweet freedom whispered in my ear, "You're a butterfly."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more