For what it's worth, insurance companies actually are charging a "fair" price, in the sense that most years, the amount that they take in in premium and the amount they pay in claims work out to be nearly even. They're not doing that out of the goodness of their heart - they're doing it because it maximizes their market share; if they don't set those rates, another company will, and they'll be priced out. The profit margins on "additional" coverages like comprehensive and collision tend to be a bit higher, but on basic liability and property, they're actually aiming to break even, or as close as possible. That ensures the biggest market share from people who want to pay their cheap rate, without too much risk of losing more than they bring in.

They make their money primarily just on investing that premium while they have it, along with some added income from fees that they charge outside of normal premium. Really, the only type of insurance that usually doesn't follow that pattern is whole life - they actually nearly always pay out more in claims than they take in premium, but that's balanced out by the fact that they get to hold on to the money for so long, they make back a much better investment profit anyways.

When we talk about markup like that, we're only including the cost of the raw ingredients - beans and water. We're not talking about the other costs of running a business.

Paying rent on the location, building and maintaining the cafe, keeping utilities on, paying employees, advertising, insurance etc. all add up to significantly more than the cost of the raw ingredients. Add all of that stuff together, and it's not like your local coffee place is running an 80% profit margin. They're managing a few percent. And if they run a profit of more than a few percent, then someone else will come in and undercut them - either taking a share of their customers, or forcing them to drop prices back down. It happens all the time.

That's why if you ever tell them "hey, I didn't like this coffee," they'll make you a new one, no questions asked. The cup of coffee is pennies lost for them; all of the other costs stay the same. They'd rather have a happy customer and lose those pennies than risk their future profit.

Insurance broker here! The primary cause of auto insurance increases (especially in the US) over the past two decades has been skyrocketing healthcare costs - and this also affects business's liability and workers' comp insurances (which pass along to the consumer) as well as personal homeowners insurance, because that also includes liability.

The property damage of an accident is usually pretty limited - a few new parts, the occasional totaled car, but these are all costs with a reasonable limit. But healthcare costs rising means that the liability is increasing - even a minor accident with mild whiplash can wind up costing thousands of dollars in medical costs, and accidents with serious bodily injury will quickly add up or hit even hit the insurance limits.

Right now specifically, because of the state of the economy, aftershocks of the supply chain issues and worker shortages, the property damage is actually becoming a bigger factor. A lot of property insurance rates are going way up right now, for exactly that reason, and it's affecting the auto rates as well. But the economic factors like that are going to come and go - the constant for several decades now has been the factor that healthcare costs play on the liability side of your insurance; that's what's generating the majority of the premium that you're paying for auto coverage.

In the MCU, the way that time travel works is different than, say, Back to the Future. All time travel stories kind of make up their own rules.

When the Avengers time traveled, they basically just jumped into a different universe, at the time and place where they wanted to be. So they go from Universe A to Universe B, and then when they want to go home, they can bounce back to Universe A So nothing they did in that different universe would directly affect their current universe. If they went to some random person's house (John Smith) in Universe B and killed him, for example, that wouldn't affect Universe A John Smith at all.

So no matter how much trouble they got into in their mission, nothing they could do in any of those parallel worlds would affect Universe A. Except, as it turns out, that they managed to let the bad guys from another world come into Universe A, and that caused some issues.

Airline food is prepared in big batches, and then split between multiple trays. So if something bad got into, say, the chicken meal, it could possibly make everyone who ate that meal very sick. If both pilots get very sick at the same time, it might get very dangerous.

It's a longshot, but it's a possibility that they want to avoid no matter what. So just to be extra safe, they always eat separate meals, so that even if the chicken meal is contaminated, the beef meal, or the vegetarian meal is probably safe, for example.

And our ancestors at the time were the early mammals - smaller, rat-like creatures, and a few other species. They were mostly scavengers who were better able to survive the difficult conditions, while many other animal and plant species died.

As things got better, without giant lizards stomping around everywhere, those mammals were able to thrive, diversify, and spread all over the world into the wide array of mammals we have today. Including the first primates, somewhere around 55 million years ago (well after the meteor extinction event), who would eventually (millions upon millions of years later) give rise to us.

Religious organizations can discriminate (with limits) for religious practices. At least in the US, there's a carveout - for example, a Catholic church can't refuse to hire a priest because he's black, or because he's handicapped, that would still be discrimination... but they can refuse to hire him if he's a Muslim, or if he's a Baptist, or even if he's married, because that directly conflicts with their religion.

But even with that, there's no legal protection of your right to kiss someone, or your right to sleep with someone, at least as far as membership in a club goes. You can't be thrown in jail for kissing someone on your college campus, but they're within their rights to kick you out, if their own rules say you can't do it.

That doesn't mean the rest of us have to like it, or even approve of it, but it's not actual discrimination.

Christian colleges are private entities - since they aren't part of the state, they can kick you out any time for any reason. Students who decide to go there (presumably because their religion is very important to them, or because it's cheaper or more prestigious than an alternative school) are choosing to follow the school's rules.

Don't get me wrong, we can certainly argue that a school's policies are draconian, or out of line with what most modern religions allow or expect of their adult members. But that doesn't mean we can stop a school from setting its own rules (within the bounds of the law), and they'll likely keep doing it as long as people are still signing up to go.

There goes my plan to make garlic confit in garlic fat….

You're thinking of "matter" and "touch" in a very specific way, but not in the most accurate way, I think. It's true that matters are mostly empty space - a nucleus surrounded by a handful of electrons, with lots of empty space in between each atom. But what matters are those electrons - they create a magnetic field that repels other atoms and their electrons. And those magnetic interactions are a huge part of what makes up "chemistry" as a science - the interactions between different atoms.

So when your hand touches your keyboard, it's not as though your atoms are brushing against the keyboard's atoms, nucleus to nucleus. Instead, it's that your magnetic fields are brushing up against each other and repelling each other - we feel that resistance as our sense of touch. So what you think of as empty space is actually what matter is - a bunch of magnetic fields pushing against each other, keeping others out of their space.

You skip every century (cause all century years like 1700, 1800 are also leap years), except for the multiples of 400. So in 2000 (which is a multiple of 400) we didn’t skip the leap year, we had it as expected. In 2100, there will be no Feb 29th, because it’ll skip.

The Earth is dong two types of movement in space - it's rotating on its axis, and it's revolving around the sun. Rotating on its axis gives us day and night - because sometimes we're facing the sun, and sometimes we're not. Revolving around the sun gives us our seasons, because of the Earth's tilt relative to the axis of the sun.

But here's the thing - those two movements don't quite match up. It would be really cool if they did, but they're just a little off. So today is November 30th, and it would be awesome if next year on this day (Nov 30, 2023), the Earth was in the exact same place relative to the sun. But it's not - it's about a quarter of a day behind. It's not a big difference, but over the years, that difference will add up. We're used to the winter solstice being around December 21, for example, but if we didn't adjust our calendar, it would start creeping up sooner and sooner. Which isn't a bad thing, but we're creatures of habit, and it's nice to have these things be more consistent.

So for consistency, we just mess with our calendar so that the year's movement and the day's rotations keep on track with each other. That maths out to roughly one day added every 4 years to keep us on track - we also skip leap years every century (except every 4th century) to keep that on track even closer to the true value. It's just a necessity because our day measurements and our year measurements don't exactly correspond with each other as neatly as we'd like.

The scales have two major differences between them - their degrees aren't the same size, and they each have different starting points. An increase of one degree Celsius is a bigger change in heat than one degree Fahrenheit (1.8 times as much), so there's a specific ratio between the two. And the Celsius scale sets its zero point at the freezing point of water, while the Fahrenheit scale sets its zero at a particular chemical reaction of ice and ammonium chloride (called a frigorific mixture), because it was consistent to reproduce and always comes to the same temperature.

So the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, you multiply by 1.8 (the ratio between their degrees) and add 32. And going from F to C, you do that backwards - subtract 32, then divide by 1.8. So 50°C using that formula gets us to 122°F.

The modern Black Hebrew Israelite movement is definitely a fringe religion - it was started in the late 1800's when a couple of people claimed to have received mystic revelations that African Americans are the direct descendants of the Hebrews. This is not an idea that's backed up by any genealogy or cultural research; just a vision. From that idea, several different groups and churches began to spawn - many of which are considered offshoots of Christianity by religious scholars and other religious groups, because they often involve Christian doctrine and scriptures that most other groups of Jews reject.

There's a current extremist fringe among some of those groups with especially harmful beliefs (anti-Semitism, black supremacy, violence against other groups, etc.) but there are also many Hebrew Israelite groups that are much more moderate - they don't advocate violence or racism. It's important not to lump everyone who's a part of the religion as a whole (even if not all of us agree with the premise of the religion) with the actual extremists that pop up on the news.

Outside of those groups, there are African Americans who are Jewish - traditionally Jewish, not Black Israelite. There are many Jews of color around the world, though there's some disagreement over whether "Jews of color" is a useful umbrella term or not, since it lumps together a huge number of groups.