Among the worst offenders is plastic, a material that is largely unregulated and can contain thousands of chemicals. Silicone and coatings on metal cans can also contain toxic or understudied compounds, Geueke said. Many paper and cardboard products were until recently treated with PFAS and can contain a layer of plastic.

Over the past 40 years, Americans have been moving to more disaster-prone regions of the U.S. South and West. “A hurricane cutting the Gulf side of Florida now just encounters way more houses, way more businesses, way more roads, way more infrastructure than it did 40 years ago,” Keys said.

At the same time, climate change has been increasing the frequency and severity of extreme storms and wildfires in those fast-growing regions. Finally, when disaster strikes, inflation and labor shortages have driven up the cost of rebuilding.

All of these factors have made disasters more expensive, and contributed to the rise in premiums. But the biggest factor behind the rise, according to Keys, is the way that climate change is reshaping a fundamental pillar of the insurance industry.

Insurance is built around the assumption that disaster doesn’t strike everyone at the same time. For many types of insurance, that assumption is mostly true — a car insurer, for example, knows that it’s unlikely that every driver will get into a fender bender on the exact same day. But when it comes to home insurance, climate change is causing this assumption to crumble. A major wildfire could easily burn down an entire town, or a hurricane could easily rip the roofs off all the homes in a neighborhood. For this reason, insurance companies in disaster-prone regions end up purchasing their own insurance policies, known as “reinsurance.”

Reinsurance protects regular insurance companies from going bankrupt from a string of major disasters. Since reinsurance companies cover the epicenters of extreme weather, they’ve recently become extremely sensitive to climate risk. Since 2020, premiums for reinsurance have doubled, and will likely continue to rise. In states that experience frequent extreme weather disasters — like Louisiana, Texas, and Florida — insurance companies end up purchasing a lot of expensive reinsurance, and those costs get passed down to customers.

This is the biggest factor behind the recent surge in home insurance premiums, and Keys doesn’t expect it to stop anytime soon. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Jacques de Vaucleroy, the chairman of the major reinsurance firm Swiss Re, said that reinsurance premiums will continue to rise until people stop building in dangerous areas.

Good article, several interesting specifics and a food overview. The last bold is mine.

Another great list.

Practical Engineering is beloved. I used to like Smarter Everyday about the same, but Grady is just so much more consistent and interesting on the infrastructure world.

And Jenny is a geek I can get along with. The Starwars hotel failure was fascinating. Wish there was a bit more economic context, but she’s great.

Looking forward to some binges here.

Lots of good ones in there. Thanks!

B1M is great, Mega Projects and others of Simon’s channels are good (some better then others). Wendover is amazing, I just wish he out more out, but the production quality is probably to high to increase the rate.

I’ll have to check the rest out. :)

He is indeed a great find. His Dubai lights was one I was just thinking about due to another post.

As I said in the other comment, PreRun mentioned the same. It’s actually impressive to see how well Ukraine has adapted to EU/NATO/Western standards whilst in a war. More ways Ukraine is winning this, or at least staying afloat.

Indeed, PreRun said similar in his most recent video about Ukraine’s War Economy. Still, percentages or some indication of how close they are to being capable would make me feel less frustrated with the situation.

I read this on the 14th or so and did a face palm. Floridaland is for the alligators apparently.

Additionally, the federal government has failed to provide sufficient data to support the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 boosters, or acknowledge previously demonstrated safety concerns associated with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, including:

• prolonged circulation of mRNA and spike protein in some vaccine recipients,

• increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections, and

• increased risk of autoimmune disease after vaccination.

And my favorite:

• Potential DNA integration from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines pose unique and elevated risk to human health and to the integrity of the human genome, including the risk that DNA integrated into sperm or egg gametes could be passed onto offspring of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients.

Apparently we are at risk of covid immune babies!

Agreed, now the fun part of coming up with a legal basis to do so and convincing regulators.

Mix of Firefox derivatives on LineageOS, or Cromite. Firefox or ungoogled chrome on a desktop.

Try reading tomshardware with ublock origin on, and without using a reader mode or other trick I couldn’t get past it’s adblock detector and Captchas (on VPN). That was several years ago so I just stopped visiting. My mental blocklist persay. Looks like it’s more accessible now, but I’ll probably still avoid it.

Yes… But what rate are they producing? Bloody article.

Guessing it’s lower then the 2000 shot daily. I know the US is ramping up it’s own production of 155.

I don’t think this requires an act of congress. I think you might see more consumer advocation on the part of FTC (although it doesn’t currently regulate online broadcast), or potentially the CFPB.

Admittedly it’s more likely to see the EU do some regulations, but it all depends on the election.

I’d you have android, I recommended newpipe or one of it’s fork like tubular. Or Seal or it’s fork Ytdlnis.

There are several front ends for yt-dlp on Mac and Windows as well.

That’s pretty impressive. I’ve been using Omnivore but newswaffle might work better. I like the open source existence. Did you find it or are you the developer?

I miss it all the time. I wish Pixels would get off their internal storage racket, or at least give you extremely large options.

While I agree, I have a hard time seeing how people will stop using it until the field changes. Maybe in 10 years it will the the MySpace of the sitcom era, but right now it’s still growing. That growth is giving it carte blanche to manipulate the users as it sees fit. Regulation might impact it, but it’s still a bit of a Goliath.

• Compared to 2023, YouTube’s user base has grown by 20 million this year, representing a 0.74% increase. From Global media insights

Also the active user base is 2.7 billion people in 2024 from the same source above.

The alternatives are out there, but just not in the same league.

I’m with the OP. I just gave up on tomshardware pages entirely, even with ublock origin, reader mode, and other tricks. The enshitification just makes it to difficult to garner the info I want, and it’s easier to find it elsewhere.

Yt-DLP and it’s variation (Seal, YTDLnis, etc.), newpipe and it’s variation (Tubular, Newpipe Sponsorblock, etc) already allow you to do this without having to get manual.

True, but worth reading their about page and privacy page. Not saying it’ll stay this way, but the way they are running is something that makes more sense then being sold as a product to Google. And you aren’t getting much of an incognito these days with all the fingerprinting they are doing.

I will admit kagi search isn’t the highest performer, but it’s viable. DDG, Start page, etc. Might give you more privacy, or not (hard to tell with DDG these days), but it might be worth trying a different model for a while.

I miss the days when the internet was truly free, but in lieu of that we have to have something better. Kagi is a start.

That’s an interesting example, I’ll have to look it out and see if the context bears it out. I say that as although yes he might have only gotten 43%, the question is how many registered voters didn’t vote and how many eligible but unregistered voters there were.

Vermont has a fairly high voter turnout, but looking at Vermont’s Secretary of State 2016 had a voter turnout of 63% of Voting Age Population from census population. So that 185k of 505k thousands people who didn’t vote.

Also if I have the right numbers from Vermont’ SOS, that’s 43% of the state total 63% who voted.

I’ve read other demographic breakdowns on those who don’t vote which is worth looking into, but it’s hard for me to see someone say that there isn’t a mass when we have this huge population of American citizen who don’t vote. Something between 35-45% of the US just doesn’t. That’s a huge swath of disenfranchised people.