According to the Urban Dictionary, this expression has been used for centuries to explain how someone has been placed in an emotional state that would cause them to be “out of one’s mind” because of strong emotions. Forms of the expression have been around from at least the 15th century. Other versions include “…beside oneself, out of one’s wits, out of one’s senses. An example that I found to be quite odd is, “I was so beside myself looking at all the women on the beach that I hadn’t heard my wife yelling for help.” That would be the statement of a man in trouble, but it doesn’t seem to match someone in such an emotional state that they were “beside themselves.”
Insurance Costs and Credit Ratings
We recently posted a commentary about how we had learned that accepting offers from retailers for price breaks if we applied for their credits cards was costing us in insurance costs. The September 2015 issue of Consumer Reports has an article about their extensive two year study of insurance costs. One of their conclusions is that, “The way insurers set prices is shrouded in secrecy and rife with inequities.” Their study resulted in study of “…2 billion car insurance price quotes from more than 700 companies with the greatest share of customers in all 33,419 general U.S. ZIP codes.” What they found “…is that behind the rate quotes is a pricing process that judges you less on driving habits and increasingly on socioeconomic factors. These include your credit history, whether you use department store or bank credit cards, and even your TV provider.”
Reading the entire article and our own experience with having higher insurance costs because of taking out more credit cards leads to the conclusion that insurance companies have found a way to artificially increase costs for customers, which of course increases their profits. Insurers “cherry pick” elements in credit reports in a proprietary manner. Some of the results are quite astonishing. The study found that “…single drivers who had merely good scores paid $68 to $526 more per year, on the average, than similar drivers with the best scores, depending on which state they called home.” Credit scores were found to have more impact on rates than driving records. Having a moving violation in Kansas increased rates by $122 per year while having only a good credit rating increased rates by $233. A poor credit rating would add an average of $1,301 a year. Another trick being used is called “price optimization,” which is prohibited in a six states. It uses data about how much of a price increase will trigger you to shop around for a better price.
One suggestion is to shop around, because there is some truth to the ads that say “People who switched to our company saved and average of…” Of course there were people who didn’t switch who aren’t included in that average. California, Hawaii, and Massachusetts prohibit insurers from using credit scores to set prices. Perhaps those of us in the other states should begin a campaign with our insurance commissioners to have our state added to that list. Page 37 of the magazine has a petition you can mail to Consumer’s Union.
Plutopia
The subtitle of this book by Kate Brown, “Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” reveals that the author was not a fan of plutonium production. The book focuses on the Hanford plant near Richland (site “W” in Manhattan Project language) in eastern Washington State and the Soviet Maiak facility near Ozersk (“Lakedale”) in the southern Russian Urals. People who lived in nuclear cities that were havens for workers, especially in the Soviet Union, but the primary focus of the book is about the hazards created. “Each kilogram of final product generates hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste.“Ozersk was one of ten nuclear cities in the Soviet Union that existed secretly, off the map…” One statement that expresses the general conclusion of the author is that, “The lethal landscapes surrounding the plutonium plants are pockmarked with landmines of percolating radioactive waste and people who are persistently sick…” Continue reading
Life Imitates Art
Wiktionary defines this as “the notion that an event in the real world was inspired by a creative work,” though I’ve always thought of it as more of an ironic comment that a real-life event happened to parallel a work of art.
Wikipedia has a more nuanced definition: a tradition in Irish writing sometimes traced to classical times, that “what is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art… Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde, who opined in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.'” Continue reading
Mass Incarceration **Update**
Mass incarceration is a growing topic of debate and I’ve recently posted a book review on the topic. This is an important political topic, so I’d like to share a related analysis from one of my favorite sites: StraightDope.com. Here’s a sample:
- “According to the World Prison Population List, the United States has… 716 prisoners per 100,000 people, the highest rate in the world.
- “At the federal level… more than half the convicts are in because of drugs. However, at the state level — and the states account for 87 percent of U.S. prisoners — drug crimes account for only 16 percent of those doing time. The majority of state prisoners — 54 percent as of 2012 — were convicted of violent crimes, 19 percent of property crimes, and the remainder everything else (e.g., drunk driving).
- “Do stiffer drug penalties single out black people? The numbers say no. Of state prisoners, 14 percent of whites are in for drugs, 15 percent of Hispanics, and 16 percent of blacks — no big diff.
- “Whites constitute 80 percent of the U.S. population and 32 percent of imprisoned violent criminals. For Hispanics, it’s 17 percent and 23 percent; for black people, 13 percent and 41 percent.
- “The appallingly high number of U.S. prisoners… resulted from get-tough-on-crime laws that have fallen most heavily on black men.”
- Please read the full post at StraightDope.com.
The high rate of violent crime convictions probably has a further story to tell, but if any of us hope legalizing pot will empty US prisons, we’re not dealing with the total issue.
The Quartet – Founders of the America We Live In
Joseph J. Ellis sub-titles his book Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783 – 1789.
In 1776, thirteen American colonies won their independence and prepared to go their separate ways, “destined to become a western version of Europe, a constellation of rival political camps and countries.” The Articles of Confederation were a Peace Pact among them, not a national government. Any far-away government was distrusted like the “quasi-paranoid hostility towards… London… [and] described as inherently arbitrary, imperious, and corrupt.” (Distances were hard to overcome back then.)
Ellis sketches biographies and covers pre-Constitution attempts at governance, the Revolutionary War, the dawning Enlightenment, the Great Debate that led to the US Constitution, and the “not-so-vacant” western lands that rendered “the local and state perspective… pathetically provincial.” Ellis provides a lot of detail on the flaws in the Confederation and political machinations that created the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Drawing on “massive,” “recently published” primary sources as well as other scholars; Ellis presents a compact 174 pages (Epub edition) with appropriate notes – fattened by appendices containing the texts of the Articles of Confederation, Constitution of the United States, and The Bill of Rights.
The vast majority of Americans had no interest in an American nation. It was “a small group of prominent leaders, in disregard to popular opinion, [who] carried the American story in a new direction.” Continue reading