#the collision won’t happen until billions of years from now

[dochub]

C O S M O S : A SPACETIME ODYSSEY - STANDING UP IN THE MILKY WAY

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was or ever will be.”  - Carl Sagan, September 28th, 1980.

A generation ago, astronomer Carl Sagan launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure: The exploration of the universe, revealed by science.

We’re about to go from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the dawn of time to the distant future. Explore galaxies, suns and worlds. Surf the gravity waves of space-time, explore planets of stars that never die, discover atoms as massive as suns, and universes smaller than atoms. 

Cosmos is also a story about us. It’s the saga of how wandering bands of hunters and gatherers found their way into the stars. One adventure. Many heroes.

If you want to see where we are in space, here it is:

Here’s what Earth looked like 250 million years ago:

And this is how it could be, 250 million years from now.

To go venture out into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we need to know our cosmic adress. And this is the first line of that adress.

Earth.

EXPLORING THE SOLAR SYSTEM

The moon, our nearest neighbor, has no sky, no ocean, no life. just scars of cosmic impacts.

Our star powers the wind and the waves and all the life on the surface of our world. 

The Sun holds all the worlds of the solar system in its gravitational embrace. Starting with Mercury...

to cloud-covered Venus, where greenhouse effect has turned it into Hell.

Mars... a world with as much land as Earth itself.

Then a belt of rocky asteroids circles the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Jupiter is like it’s own solar system, with it’s four giant moons and dozens of smaller ones. It has more mass than all the other planets combined. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot... a hurricane 3 times the size of our whole planet, that’s been raging for centuries.

The crown jewel of our solar system, Saturn. Ringed by freeways of countless orbiting and slowly tumbling snowballs, each, a little moon.

Uranus...

and Neptune, the outermost planets, unknown to the ancients, only discovered after the invention of the telescope.

Beyond, lies a swarm of tens of thousands frozen worlds. Pluto being one of them.

Of all our spacecraft, Voyager 1 is the one that’s traveled farthest from home. She bears a message to a billion years from now. Something of who we were, how we felt and the music we made. Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night”.

From out here, the Sun may look like just another star, but it still exerts it’s gravitational hold on a trillion frozen comets, leftovers from the formation of the solar system, nearly five billion years ago. It’s called, the Oort Cloud. No one has ever seen it before, nor could they, for each of these little worlds is as far from it’s nearest neighbor as Earth is from Saturn. This enormous cloud of comets encloses the solar system, which is the second line of our cosmic adress.

Earth, Solar System.

EXPLORING THE MILKY WAY.

Rogue planet. World without a sun. Our galaxy has billions of them, adrift in perpetual night. Orphans, cast away from their mother stars during the chaotic birth of their native systems. They’re molten at the core, but frozen at the surface. There may be oceans of liquid water in between those extremes. Who knows what might be swimming in there?

How many worlds? How many stars? How many ways of being alive? Where are we in this picture? 

That’s where we live - about 30,000 light-years from the center. The Milky Way Galaxy is the next line of our cosmic adress. 

Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy. 

Andromeda, the galaxy next door, we call our two giant galaxies, and a smattering of smaller ones, the “local group”. Can’t even find our home galaxy from out here. It’s one of thousands in the Virgo Supercluster. 

On this scale, all the light we see, even the tiniest dots are galaxies. Each containing billions of suns, countless worlds. Yet, the entire Virgo Supercluster is but a tiny part of our universe. This is the cosmos on the grandest scale we know. A network of billion of galaxies. It’s the last line of our cosmic adress... For now.

Earth, Solar System, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe. That’s our cosmic adress.

Many of us suspect that all of this, all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe is one but tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes... A multiverse. Universe upon Universe. Worlds without end. 

EXPLORING TIME

How can we, humans, who rarely live more than a century, hope to grasp the vast expanse of time that is the history of the cosmos? The universe is 13.8 thousand million years old. In order to imagine all of cosmic time, let’s compress it into a single calendar year.

Cosmic Calendar begins on January 1st, with the birth of our universe. It contains everything that’s happened since then, up to now, which on this calendar, is midnight, December 31st.

On this scale, every month represents about a billion years. Every day, nearly 40 million years. Let’s go back as far as we can, to the very first moment of the universe.

January 1st. The Big Bang.

It’s as far back as we can see in time... for now. Our entire universe emerged from a point smaller than a single atom. Space itself exploded in a cosmic fire, launching the expansion of the universe and giving birth to all the energy and matter we know today. As it expanded, the universe cooled and there was darkness for about 200 million years. Gravity was pulling together clumps of gas and heating them, untill the first stars burst into light, on January 10th.

On January 13th, these stars coalesced into the first small galaxies. Those galaxies merged to form still larger ones, including our own Milky Way, which formed about 11 billion years ago, on March 15th, of the cosmic year.

Hundreds of billions of suns. Which one is ours? Not yet born. It’ll rise from the ashes of other stars.

See those flashing lights, like paparazzi? Each one, a supernova. The blazing death of a giant star. Stars die and are born in supernovas, the stellar nurseries.

They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together within them, to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars.

You, me, everyone...

How much longer until the birth of our Sun? A long time. It won’t begin to shine for another six billion years. Our Sun’s birthday is August 31st, on the Cosmic Calendar... four and a half billion years ago.

As with the other worlds, Earth was formed from a disk of gas and dust orbiting the newborn Sun. Repeated collision produced a growing ball of debris.  The Earth took one hell of a beating in it’s first billion years.

Fragments of orbiting debris collided...

 and coalesced untill they snowballed to form our Moon.

The Moon is a souvenir of that violent epoch. It was ten times closer back then, locked in a much more intimate gravitational embrace. As the Earth cooled, seas began to form. The tides were a thousand times higher then. Over the eons, tidal friction within Earth pushed the moon away.

Life began somewhere around Semptember 21st, three and a half billion years ago on our little world. For all we know, life may have come from another part of the Milky Way.

December 17th was quite a day. Life in the sea really took off, exploding with a diversity of larger plants and animals. Tiktaalik was one of the first animals to venture onto land. It must have felt like visiting another planet.

Forests, dinosaurs, birds, insects, all evolved in the final week of December. The first flower, bloomed on December 28th.

The universe is already more than 13.5 billion years old. Still no sign of us. In the ocean of time that this calendar represents, we humans only evolved within the last hour of the last day of the cosmic year. 11:59 and 46 seconds.

All of recorded history occupies only the last 14 seconds, and every person you’ve ever heard of, lived somewhere in there:

All kings, battles, migrations and inventions, wars, loves, everything in the history books happened here, in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar. 

Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors, yours and mine, stood up. Once standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated to the ground. We were free to look up in wonder. For the longest part of human existence, the last 40,000 generations, we were wanderers, living in small bands of hunters and gatherers, making tools, controlling fire, naming things. All within the last hour of the cosmic calendar. 

We’re so very young on the time scale of the universe, that we didn’t start painting our first pictures until the last 60 seconds, a mere 30,000 years ago.

This is when we invented astronomy. In fact, we’re all descended from astronomers. Our survival depended on knowing how to read the stars to predict the coming of the winter, the migration of wild herds. Then, 10,000 years ago, began a revolution in the way we lived. Our ancestors learned how to shape their environment, taming wild plants and animals, cultivating land and settling down.

This changed everything. For the first time in our history, we had more stuff than we could carry. We needed a way to keep track of it. At 14 seconds to midnight, or about 6,000 years ago, we invented writing.

Writting allowed us to save thoughts and send them much further in space and time. It shook the world. Moses was born seven seconds ago. Buddha, six seconds ago. Jesus, five seconds ago. Mohammed, three seconds ago. It was not even 2 seconds ago that, for better or worse, the two halves of the Earth discovered each other. And it was only at the very last second of the Cosmic Calendar that we began to use science to reveal nature’s secrets and her laws. 

The scientific method is so powerful that in a mere 4 centuries, it has taken us from Galileo’s first look through a telescope at another world to leaving our footprints on the Moon. 

It allowed us to look out across space and time, to discover where and when we are in the cosmos.

Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It’s the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher, a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

Now, come with me. Our journey is just beginning.

[saturnsdead]

Tell me about space!

👀 i didn’t think anyone would actually send me anything i love u....

but uhhh,, i didn’t realize how much i wrote so i’m gna put it under a cut

okay so one random thing i can think of that i think is pretty cool that i like to think about is something that i think a lot of people have thought about Somewhat before, but it’s still cool and i like hearing people’s opinions on it  we obviously know that light is the fastest thing that we know of, but i don’t think people too often think about how that correlates to light-years. for example, the sun is 8 light minutes away, so if the sun were to theoretically go out suddenly the earth wouldn’t know until 8 minutes later when it caught up to us.   the star Rigel, which is in the constellation Orion, is almost 865 light years away from us. so using the previous logic, we’re seeing the Rigel’s light that was given off from about 1155CE.   what i think is really cool about this is, while we know it’s moving towards us & will collide with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years (see the pics of what we think it’ll look like here, it’s expected that our planetary system will survive the clash!), the Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away currently. I wonder just how different that galaxy is from us now vs the one we see in our night sky reflective of what it looked like 4.5 billion years ago.     -> to explain this just a bit more, our own sun has a lifetime of about 10 billion years (and it is about ~5-6 billion years old currently), it will be close to, if not already, becoming a red giant and swallowing Mercury, Venus, and potentially Earth when the collision happens       -> some other star lifetimes: blue supergiant - 10 million years, blue giant - ~1-3 million years, red supergiant - between 100,000 to 1 million years, red giant - 1 billion years, red dwarf - 10 trillion years, white dwarf - between 10 and 20 billion years. ( I doubt you’d want me to explain the “lifetime” of stars, but  🔍 👀)

 so, with that knowledge, SO MUCH of what we currently can see of Andromeda (and the rest of the universe!) is so much different than the light that has travelled to us that we can see today. when we are looking into the night sky, we’re actually looking into the past - be it Proxima Centauri’s light from about 4 years ago, or MACS0647-JD’s from about 13.8 billion years ago (btw, the universe is about the same age as MACS0647-JD.) this means we see  MACS0647-JD in it’s INFANCY, from the very beginning of our universe. 

 if we go one step further, and think about it the other way, MACS0647-JD also sees us from 13.8 billion years ago. they couldn’t even see our star because it is only ~5 billion years old.  i also wonder what MACS0647-JD sees. there’s no way that it sees the void on one of it’s sides and then what we can see on the other. what can MACS0647-JD see that we can’t, solely because it hasn’t been enough time for that light to get to earth. just how much are we missing out on that is happening in the universe because of just how far away everything is? some other planet where there is intelligent life could be 6 million light years away looking at earth, and see the dinosaurs. there could have been ENTIRE intelligent species that has lived and died out, and we won’t even know in our lifetimes. Every Day there could be another star, another planetary system, another anything every single day. 

[ibtk]

Book Review: THE SEVENTH MANSION by Maryse Meijer

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review though Edelweiss. Trigger warning for sexual assault, homophobia, violence against animals, and disturbing sexual content.)

-- 4.5 stars --

There is this person I love. And he’s not even a person.

After Xie's parents split and an environmental disaster sends his already precarious mental health spiraling, Xie and his father Erik relocate from California to an unnamed town in the rural south, in search of the proverbial fresh start.

At first, Xie is your garden-variety teenage outcast: melancholy. goth. vegan. an outsider. friendless. forgettable. Yet he's quickly "adopted" by the only other vegans in the school - girlfriends Jo and Leni, who together make up the entirety of FKK.

The group's animal rights activism slowly evolves from leafleting to direct action: the trio breaks into a local mink farm, freeing as many of its captives as they can. Xie is nabbed during the getaway, and suddenly he goes from "nobody" to "that freak who vandalized the Moore farm". Instead of silence and indifference, Xie is met by hostile sneers, gossip, and relentless bullying. He takes a leave of absence from high school, instead getting one-on-one tutoring at the local library. His parents are forced to pay restitution, and Xie's placed on probation.

Xie's only respite is nature: his burgeoning vegetable garden; the small but pristine forest behind his house; and, eventually, the mysterious light, nestled among the branches, that leads him to a tiny church - and his beloved. St. Pancratius, who was martyred in 304 A.D. and whose remains are on covert display in a one-room church in the middle of nowhere.

He traces the image with his finger. The story the same in every version: A boy on a road, refusing to lift his sword against the lamb, losing his head every time the story is told, again and again and again.

Still, all of this comes with a cost: loving nature, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, means saying goodbye to it one day. Relationships can be messy, even when they're with clean bones. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our own shit that we're oblivious to what our loved ones are going through. Maybe your tutor shows up to work one day piss drunk and tells you about her abortion. Or your friends drag you to a backwoods meeting of environmental activists, where one of them sexually assaults you. Or you show up to a mass protest that is even more massive than you anticipated, and find you're unable to protect yourself, let alone the 55 billion+ land animals slaughtered for food every year in the US alone (animalclock.org).

The problem is too big, even when it's one of the smaller ones. The problem is impossible.

While disturbing, Xie's theft of a skeleton is not the worst crime he'll commit in his teen years. As FKK becomes involved with a local animal rights group, and Xie's sanctuary is threatened, he careens toward an inevitable (????) collision with the outside world, which neither understands him - nor cares to. (Fuck capitalism.)

THE SEVENTH MANSION is one weird-ass book; I mean, the main character has sex with a skeleton (!). This is certainly the wildest aspect of the story, but it's not alone. For example, take the narrative structure, which has a kind of stream-of-(Xie's)-consciousness vibe. Many of the sentences are fractured, even forced, as though we're pulling them from the depth's of Xie's tortured soul. His thoughts. Are broken. Up. Like this. Conversely, there are no chapters, and so many of the paragraphs are just huge, unbroken blocks of text - almost as though Meijer is framing Xie in opposition to the larger world around him.*

I suspect that THE SEVENTH MANSION is one of those love it or hate it dealios. Personally, I loved it, even as some parts proved excruciatingly unbearable to read.

I don't know whether Meijer is vegan, but she gets so much right; sometimes it felt like she was rooting around inside my head. I went vegetarian my freshman year of college (1996, not to date myself) and vegan about 9 years later. Reading Xie was like having a mirror held up to my own depressive, anxious, vegan psyche. One thing carnists probably don't realize about walking around this world as a vegan is: it takes a ton of mental work, of suppression and dissociation, just to get through the day.

Animal suffering is omnipresent, and largely accepted. From Carl's Jr. commercials to classroom trips to the zoo; leather car seats to team lunches at non-vegan restaurants, where you'll be forced to watch your coworkers and friends devour the corpse of a once-living creature - someone's mother, brother, or child - we are constantly forced to bear witness to the oppression of animals. Worse, to pretend as though it's of no consequence: just to get along, or because doing otherwise would quickly devour your time, your prospects, your relationships. To say that it's depressing is an understatement.

Whether Xie is living through the oil spill that finally made his world "snap," or gazing into the eyes of caged mink, I was right there with him, trying not to cry. Not to break. There's so much suffering in the world; if you try to take it all in, to truly understand its scope, it will swallow you whole.

Speaking of the oil spill, which was the impetus for Xie to go vegan - Meijer's description of this moment in Xie's life brought back so many memories. When I decided to stop eating meat, I was working at a local grocery store. Every now and again, they had an employee appreciation dinner (in lieu of a raise, natch), which basically consisted of all you can eat burgers and hot dogs in the break room. Everyone would stuff their faces, taking in as many free calories as possible. Not because they were hungry, but to get as much of a leg up on our cheap ass employer as possible. The sheer gluttony and waste of it all is what finally did it for me. No one needed to eat seven hamburgers in one night; we did because we could, because not doing so would be to lose out. The working class eating the chattel, and no one eating the rich.

Point being, that's a singular moment in my life that I'll never forget. It stands out in stark relief, right alongside the deaths of my husband and furkids (six dogs and one cat down and counting). If I close my eyes, I can almost transport myself back there, white starched shirt, demo table, 7PM Friday fatigue, and all.

The last time he ate meat he was twelve years old, after the spill: Xie was Alex then. Even miles from the beach, they could smell something off; at first they thought it was the sandwiches, ham pressed hot in the pockets of Erik’s windbreaker, but the closer they got to the beach the stronger the smell became, noxious, chemical. They parked at their usual spot, yellow tape blocking access to the beach beyond. A black ribbon flat against the horizon; that was the water. No trace of blue. On the rocks below the lot a half dozen pelicans huddled together. Coated from beak to foot in oil. Don’t touch them, his father said. Someone will come wash it off. But there was no one. The black sea lapping the sand. Those bewildered eyes. He watched as one of the birds collapsed, its head twisted sideways against its folded neck. His father pulled him away. The fire on the water burned for two weeks; the beach remained black for a year. Sea turtles, dolphins, whales, gulls, crabs, otters, fish, birds rolled up by the waves in the tens of thousands. Oil on meat on sand. No stopping it. Xie got headaches, bloody noses; he was always tired, couldn’t sleep. His mother standing in the doorway, Stop playing games, you’re fine. But his father was never angry. Scared of what he saw. Xie in the dark. Unable to make it from one room to another. The people who used to go to the beach just went somewhere else. Life as usual. Slumped in the backseat as his father fed gas into the truck he suddenly couldn’t stand it. Stopped standing it. He opened the back door, started walking. Alex, his father called, but he was not Alex anymore. He poured out all the milk in the house and fed the meat to the dogs next door and rode his bike everywhere.

So yeah, our circumstances may be different, but Xie's conversion sure hit me in the feels.

Meijer also does an excellent job capturing the heartbreak and urgency of Millennials and Gen Z. As tormented as I might have been in high school, at least I had the luxury of not thinking too much about climate change - at least until Al Gore came along. Xie and his peers, on the other hand, will bear the brunt of their predecessors' unchecked greed. Nowhere is this divide more eloquently laid bare than in Jo's post-march argument with Erik (who is likely around my age):

Didn’t you see how he just folded up out there? He can’t protect himself, he won’t. You don’t know what he was like, before we came here, okay, you didn’t watch him, lying in bed day after day, ready to cut his goddamn throat because of all this shit, this constant litany of doomsday statistics, he just takes it in and he can’t—he doesn’t know what to do with it, and you want to keep shoving it in his face, when it’s—it’s enough! Staring at Jo, who stares back. Look, whatever you’re afraid of, whatever he’s afraid of, it’s already happening, okay? And he knows it, he’s living it, and he wants to do something about it. If there was some other option, some fantasyland where everything is going to be fine as long as we bury our heads in the sand, then believe me, I’d take it. But there’s not. Not for me and not for Leni and not for Xie and if you think you can protect him by denying that then you’re just—wrong. I’m sorry. She holds Erik’s gaze; he nods, the first to look away.

My gods, that scene just cuts me to the bone. As bleak as things are now, I cannot imagine going through all this - climate change, COVID-19, a Trump presidency, Democratic ineptitude/complicity, *gesturing wildly* - as an adolescent. Their elders cut them down before they even started crawling.  

On a lighter note, Xie's scenes with his clueless mom and her equally clueless new husband (Jerry!) brought a(n admittedly wry) smile to my face. If I had a penny for every times this scene has played out in my life, I'd have enough cash monies to start my own animal sanctuary.

Don’t you want some vegetables, Xie? Jerry asks. I don’t eat animal products, Xie murmurs, and Jerry, confused, staring at the green beans, How is this— Butter, Xie interrupts. Butter is from milk, which is from cows, which are animals. Jerry blinks. Gosh, I didn’t even think of that. Sorry. Xie shrugs.

There's so much to obsess about here: I love Jo and Leni together, and their opposing circumstances just make the relationship so much more complex - and potentially fraught. Erik and tutor Karen (I wonder if the name choice was intentional?) are interesting supporting characters, and their relationships with Xie are so beautiful and nuanced; they both support him the best they know how.

Xie's interactions with his phantom lover are a little more confusing and difficult for me to comprehend. Perhaps P. represents Xie's inability to connect with the human world around him, or at least not as well as the more abstract, ephemeral natural world. Possibly P. is Xie's ideal human: one who would rather die than raise a finger against an animal (or one who cannot disappoint you by voicing their own opinions). Or maybe it's simpler than that, and Xie's hallucinations are just that: hallucinations. In any case, it made an already odd book absolutely bizarre, but in a good way, so I can't complain.

* This could just be because I was reading an early copy in need of further editing - but, seeing as how some formatting was already present, I think it was intentional. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3672191091

[junker-town]

The 10 least consequential athletes of the decade

Some rules before we begin:

This list is arranged in no particular order, because my definition of “inconsequential” is somewhat arbitrary and varies from case to case. It might mean that the athlete’s career was a meaningless blip on the radar, or brilliantly brief and terrible, or impressively invisible. If you take issue with anything you read here, I pledge to rewrite it to your satisfaction and mail you $100.

This list is nearly entirely made up of athletes competing at the top echelon of their sport, as fun as it would be to mock four-year-old T-ball first basemen who stood directly on top of the base, wore their glove on the wrong hand and cried.

This list is entirely made up of men. Women’s sports made enormous strides in the 2010s, and even those who played, say, two career minutes of WNBA basketball still contributed to something meaningful. None of the guys below were doing anything important.

If you’re one of the guys on this list, and you read this, please take some satisfaction in the knowledge that in 2012, I had to seek medical attention after injuring my knee playing Wiffle ball.

Chris Pettit

Pinch runner, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, 2011

In this decade, Chris Pettit came tantalizingly close to playing the least amount of baseball a Major League Baseball player can possibly play.

Pettit appeared in exactly one 2010s game. On April 8, 2011, the Angels trailed the Blue Jays by a run with two out in the bottom of the ninth. After slow-footed catcher Hank Conger singled, Pettit, who had shown impressive speed in the minors, was sent in as his pinch runner. Up next was 24-year-old Peter Bourjos, by no means a power hitter. In this situation, Pettis likely took a fairly conservative lead off first.

Bourjos struck out on four pitches. Pettis walked off the field and was never seen in the major leagues again.

Baseball’s classic cup-of-coffee story is that of Moonlight Graham, the rookie who famously trotted out to right field, never saw anything hit his way, and ended his career without ever getting to bat or field a baseball. In his farewell game, Pettit did even less: he walked fewer steps to take his position, he was only out there for a minute or so, and he never once wore a glove or held a bat.

Hypothetically, we can imagine an appearance less meaningful than this one, but only barely. Changing Bourjos’ result to a line-out on the first pitch is no good, because if that happens, our man Pettit becomes a baserunner with a ball in play, if only for a second or two. His heart rate probably spikes. Can’t have that. No, this needs to be a strikeout. The only tragedy, then, is that Bourjos struck out on four pitches and not three.

If we want to get greedy, we can imagine the Angels as the visiting team. Playing at home, their dugout was on the left side of the field, meaning Pettit had to jog all the way across the diamond to take his place at first. As the visitor, first base would have been just a few steps away from the bench.

Pettit stood there for a minute with bare and empty hands. That was his Major League Baseball decade. It might very well be the most meaningless decade a major league baseball player has ever experienced.

Darius Johnson-Odom

Shooting guard, Los Angeles Lakers and Philadelphia 76ers, 2012-2014

In contrast to Darius Johnson-Odom’s storied career at Marquette and his years in China and Italy, his NBA life lasted 21 minutes. They were a very, very busy 21 minutes. His 11 shot attempts came from everywhere on the floor — a layup, a scattering of mid-range shots, and a couple of heaves from at least 26 feet out. All 11 of them missed. He was once sent to the stripe for a pair of free-throw attempts, and he missed both of those as well.

Across NBA history, 14 players have attempted at least three field goals and ended their career with zero points. Johnson-Odom left them all in the dust.

He did everything else, from rebounding to stealing to assisting to fouling. He was all over the floor. In the end, his career usage rate stood at 28.4 percent, higher than that of Patrick Ewing, Blake Griffin, and Damian Lillard.

This is perhaps the greatest testament to the inconsequential nature of Johnson-Odom’s career: even if we decided to rewrite the record books and rule that every one of his 11 shots went in, it would not change the result of a single game. He never even attempted a shot that mattered.

His full name, Darius Earvin Johnson-Odom, sneaks in the names of two fellow Lakers with considerably more notable careers. The two names appear to have canceled one another out entirely, a phenomenon we also see in a man named ...

JamesOn Curry

Point guard, Los Angeles Clippers, 2010

In the 2010s, the NBA revolved around LeBron James and Stephen Curry. The two megastars spent four consecutive Finals smashing their teams against one another. Before the opening tip of every season, at least one of them was correctly presumed destined for the Finals as though they were sitting presidents running for a second term.

“James on Curry” sounds like the god of the NBA guarding the other god of the NBA. “JamesOn Curry” is the name of a guy whose entire career can fit in a GIF. Welcome to the start of JamesOn Curry’s NBA career.

Welcome to the end of JamesOn Curry’s NBA career. It lasted 3.9 seconds, making it the shortest in the history of the league.

Curry had been through it all just to get here, and now lives a life as a youth basketball instructor that makes him happier than he guesses an NBA career would have. We’re free to laugh at these 3.9 seconds all we want. God knows I am. Curry has better things to do. Besides, as he pointed out, he probably got paid more per second than anyone else in NBA history.

Glenn Winston

Running back, Cleveland Browns, 2014-2015

After assaulting a hockey player while in college, spending six months in jail, and going undrafted, Glenn Winston had found his way into the NFL. A running back by trade, he appeared mostly as a special-teamer for the Browns before finally receiving his first career carry on Dec. 13, 2015.

Some GIFs make a sound. This one says, “bloop!”

The 49ers’ Ian Williams doesn’t just strip the ball, he punches it out like a golfer trying to negotiate a sand trap. It shot eight yards downfield. Fumbling away one’s first career carry is bad enough, but this ensured an extra indignity. Because the ball wasn’t recovered until it was eight yards downfield, this play went in the books as a negative-eight-yard run, a result that usually implies a ball carrier unwilling to cut his losses or a catastrophic jet sweep. Winston didn’t even get the satisfaction of trying something crazy. He bet $10 and lost $100.

Winston never carried the ball again, cementing his career line: one carry, negative-8 yards, one fumble. Among pure running backs, it is the lowest career yardage total in the 100-year history of the NFL.

Also among pure running backs, Winston is one of just four players to fumble away their only career rushing attempt. Another of those four, incredibly, was Winston’s teammate. Fullback Malcolm Johnson had been placed on injured reserve a few days prior, and would go on to drop his only carry the following season.

This was a meaningless late-season game featuring two teams that finished last in their respective divisions.

It was reported Winston suffered a concussion on this play.

Baxter Price

Guard, Mississippi State, 2010-2013

The fans in Starkville wanted so, so badly for Baxter Price to take a shot. He would not.

“I think it goes without saying, when I get out there on the court, I’m not there to score.”

In basketball, the box score practically begs a player to somehow register, to prove you did indeed exist at some point and weren’t a mere bookkeeping error. Some can’t or won’t. “Club Trillion,” popularized by Ohio State’s Mark Titus, is a fraternity of players who have finished a game with 1 in the minutes column and 0 in every other, forming a box score that reads 1000000000000, or one trillion. Many can claim membership in this club, but Baxter Price is an especially valued shopper. In the 2010s, he finished with:

17 one-trillion games,

four two-trillion games (in other words, two minutes played and no other stats),

a three-trillion game,

a five-trillion game,

a six-trillion game, and

an eight-trillion game.

That eight-trillion game fell on Feb. 13, 2013, during a 78-36 clobbering at the hands of Missouri. Price, a walk-on on his home court with a cult following, had every reason to attempt a shot; the Bulldogs were down 34-10 at halftime and none of his teammates could hit a bucket to save their lives. If a guy named Craig Sword is permitted to go 0-for-8, surely Price is allowed that indulgence. Instead, he spent eight garbage minutes — 480 seconds — on the floor without notching a shot attempt, assist, rebound, steal, block, foul, or turnover. Did he at least touch the ball at some point? Probably, but we have no evidence of it.

Price did score one bucket in 2009, but in this decade, he was almost entirely invisible. He spent 118 minutes on the floor and totaled 30 basketball things (six shot attempts, six rebounds, two assists, one block, nine turnovers, six fouls, and zero points).

That’s one basketball act every four minutes or so. It’s the faint signal of a distant star we will never visit. Price played basketball billions of years ago and billions of light-years away, but we are nearly certain that at one point, he was there.

Joel Rechlicz

Right winger, New York Islanders and Washington Capitals, 2010-2012

Thank heavens for arbitrary cutoff dates. Take stock of Joel Rechlicz’s career as a whole, and you find an enforcer who played a scattering of games. But if we focus specifically on his 2010s, we find something really special.

It was his job to start fights, and he did it with flair. His first fight, in April 2010, resembles a video game with poor collision detection.

Rechlicz earned five minutes in the penalty box for this one; later that night, he would receive another 15 minutes for a much more boring fight against Eric Godard.

It would be nearly two years until Rechlicz appeared in another NHL game. In 2012, he was quiet during a couple of brief appearances for the Capitals on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1. On Feb. 13, he hit the ice for 90 seconds, drew a 10-minute misconduct penalty, and left the NHL for good.

In the 2010s, he totaled 30 minutes in the penalty box and just nine and a half minutes on the ice playing actual hockey. That is absolutely as bizarre as it sounds.

This decade, NHL players spent a combined 12 years and change on the ice playing regular-season hockey, and they spent a combined 151 days in the penalty box, yielding a ratio of 3.2 percent. Behold the penalty minutes ratio of Rechlicz:

This man spent the vast majority of his 2010s NHL career sitting in a little room by himself. They shouldn’t have bothered to issue him a hockey stick. He was not a hockey player. He was a brave wanderer. He did not play the sport he played, and I celebrate him for that.

Joseph Sandoval

Bantamweight fighter, UFC, 2011-2012

Sandoval went 6-2 as a fighter, with both losses handed to him in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Forty-five seconds into his UFC career, Joseph Sandoval got kicked in his penis and balls. It was an accidental low blow from Walel Watson, and things like this just happen from time to time, but the broadcast heaped on an extra indignity. You might wonder why in the world this is captured in slow motion:

Well, during the stoppage, they pulled up a slo-mo replay just so announcers Joe Rogan and Mike Goldberg could laugh at him.

ROGAN: A replay, because America loves these. There you go, folks.

GOLDBERG: [laughing] We show it ‘cause we can.

ROGAN. Yes. Sit at home on your couch and be happy that’s not you.

GOLDBERG: [laughing]

Seconds later, Sandoval took a dozen hammers to the face and was knocked out just over a minute into the fight. He returned to the octagon in 2012 for a prelim bout against Nick Denis, who threw some devastating elbows at his head and knocked him out in just 22 seconds. That was it for his UFC career.

Typically, entry-level UFC prelim fighters get $10,000 to show up and fight and an additional $10,000 if they win, which is an absurdly low level of compensation. Accounting for the gym fees, training, licensing, nutrition, and everything else a fighter like Sandoval has to pony up for, he quite possibly actually lost money on this venture, essentially paying for the privilege of taking a thrashing in the octagon, getting kicked in the wiener, and being made fun of by the Fear Factor man.

Mike Trout

Outfielder, Los Angeles Angels, 2011-2019

Don’t get mad at me. This is exactly what he wants.

I recently set up a poll of my Twitter followers to ask them whether they know who Mike Trout is. These people, of course, are far more likely to be sports fans than the average person. Even then, of the approximately 7,000 responses, a full third — 33.8 percent — responded that they’re either only vaguely aware of him, or they have no idea of who he is.

The same people who are unfamiliar with Trout are certainly also unfamiliar with Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. This baseball metric is an effort to estimate how many more wins a team won with a given player than they would have with a replacement-level player in his place. Remember that this is a counting statistic, like home runs or RBI:

Trout is only 28 years old. Even if he retired today, his WAR of 72.5 would eclipse 68 percent of all players in the Hall of Fame. Earlier this year he surpassed Derek Jeter, who played until age 40. If his next season is anything like his last eight seasons, he’ll sail past Frank Thomas, Reggie Jackson, Joe DiMaggio, and Pete Rose before his 30th birthday. The season after that, he’s very likely to pass Nolan Ryan, Ken Griffey, Jr., and Chipper Jones.

Forecasting WAR is a pretty stupid game to play, so let’s at least stay conservative. If Trout immediately regresses to playing 5.0 WAR seasons, rather than his usual 9.0, and retires 10 years from now, he’ll move just barely above Lou Gehrig. Babe Ruth is probably the only guy out of reach. Apart from him, there’s no telling where he’ll end up, but we’re headed for a future in which Mike Trout is considered one of the very greatest baseball players who ever lived.

He is not as well-known as Tim Tebow, who hit .163 in triple-A last season, has never appeared in the major leagues, and is probably the most well-known active baseball player in America.

This is a triumph for Trout, who is getting exactly what he wants. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently took the unusual step of criticizing Trout for not putting in the effort to market himself, but Trout responded with one of my favorite character traits: genial, kind, and yet absolutely, immovably stubborn. All good, man! Cool! I like to play baseball and spend time with my family. Good luck with your business ventures.

He’s accomplished the impossible. He’s the greatest player of his generation, he’s played in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, and he’s less famous than every member of the Kars 4 Kids band.

Trout’s career is also a case study in how little individual greatness can matter in baseball. In terms of ability, he stands above his peers like Lamar Jackson and LeBron James do. Jackson has transformed his team into the best in the NFL. The NBA orbits around James. Nine years into the Trout era, the Angels have never won a playoff game, and have finished with a losing record in each of the last four seasons.

Many great athletes have been thought of as godlike, but being great is only half the idea. To be a god, you must also be invisible.

Maurice Simpkins

Special teams, Green Bay Packers, 2010

Maurice Simpkins was a computer programmer who made some extra cash playing linebacker for the Green Bay Blizzard, an Indoor Football League team. A block up the street, the Packers were plagued by injuries. Desperate to shore up their special teams unit, they signed Simpkins. “He was added to camp as just a body, basically,” explained Joe Buck, just after Simpkins registered one of the unlikeliest kick returns ever.

It’s unclear exactly how many plays Simpkins was on the field for. He was certainly never meant to touch the ball. Near halftime on Oct. 10, 2010, Washington kicker Graham Gano squared up and kicked the ball right at A.J. Hawk’s helmet.

Whether he did so intentionally, I can’t say, but it’s what allowed Simpkins to go into the books as a kick returner.

He did the smart thing, which was to fall on the ball and lie there until tagged. Simpkins never touched the ball again. He now runs a tech consulting firm, and I hope to God that when those 2010 Packers went on to win the Super Bowl, they gave him a ring.

Rico Richardson

Wide receiver, Tennessee Titans, 2014-2015

In football, a “target” refers to an instance of a player being thrown the ball, whether or not he catches it. It’s been tracked as an NFL statistic since 1992. In the decades since, only 11 players have ever received five or more targets without ever actually catching the ball once in their entire career.

For most of these men, this wasn’t such a big deal. Micah Ross, Isaiah Burse, Mitchell Galloway, and Terrence Warren were listed as receivers, but really spent most of their time as kick and/or punt returners. Dominique Davis, Kion Wilson, Khreem Smith, Jeff Smith and Tim Johnson played other positions entirely, and were largely targeted in gimmick plays. The only true receivers ever to suffer this fate are the Patriots’ Anthony Ladd, who played briefly in 1998, and the hero of our story, Rico Richardson.

Richardson was a former high school track and field champion who ran an impressive 4.38 40-yard dash at an NFL Combine. After going undrafted in 2013, he became a practice-squad regular who bounced from team to team. In 2014, he landed on the Titans’ roster, and on Nov. 1, 2015, he was thrown his first-ever NFL football.

Fourth-and-4. The Titans are down by two scores with just under five minutes left in the game. Their quarterback, Zach Mettenberger, puts it on the money, but when the Texans’ Johnathan Joseph swoops in to knock it out of the way, there isn’t much Richardson can do about it.

Minutes later, with the game all but conceded, Mettenberger leads Richardson straight into double-coverage. He has zero chance of hauling this in, and is clobbered.

Two weeks later, the Titans are once again wrapping up a loss in the final minutes, this time with Marcus Mariota behind center. Wideout Justin Hunter is injured, pressing Richardson into action. Mariota tries to find him deep, but sails an uncatchable ball way over his head.

It’s now Nov. 19. Titans at Jaguars. It’s the last NFL game Richardson will ever play. Near halftime, Mariota drops back into his own end zone on third-and-14. Richardson has shaken his man and set the table for a wide-open first down.

Mariota puts it even further over his head, and the Titans punt.

We’re late in the fourth quarter now. The Titans trail by six. With 1:10 remaining, Mariota is forced to scramble out of the pocket. Since Richardson is within 20 miles of the throw, he goes in the books as the targeted receiver, but he can do nothing but watch as a nameless staffer catches the ball several steps out of bounds.

Five seconds remaining, Titans still down by six. Richardson is about to get an opportunity no one like him ever, ever gets. Titans head coach Mike Mularkey calls a play that specifically calls for the ball to be thrown to the wideout on the right side.

That’s Richardson.

A timeout is called before the play, giving Mularkey every opportunity to switch him out for any one of his other receivers. He doesn’t! On the play that will decide the game, Mularkey is sticking with a guy who has never caught an NFL pass.

Richardson’s odds aren’t great. The Jaguars have pulled seven guys all the way back, essentially making this a short Hail Mary. What’s important is that he has a chance. There would be no better way to establish his place on an NFL roster than to haul in the game-winning touchdown.

This time figures to be different. Every other ball he’s ever been thrown has been impossible to catch, whether out of bounds, 1- feet over his head, or directly into double-coverage. We can say this much about the Hail Mary: it’s almost certainly going to be inbounds, with a high, slow arc that will give Richardson enough time to make a play on it. No matter what happens, no matter how much traffic there is in the end zone, he will finally have a chance. That is all we, his biggest fans, are asking for. A chance.

Mariota takes the snap. Richardson races upfield, hits the goal line, breaks left, and turns to see that the Jaguars’ four-man rush has somehow eaten the Titans’ line alive. Mariota is looking, looking, looking, and chased down from behind.

He didn’t even make a throw.

At the end, the coaches’ camera catches Richardson in the corner. He’s standing bolt upright, arms at his sides and feet right next to each other like a toy soldier, watching his career arrive at its end.

The Jaguars, a bad team that will finish 5-11, have beaten the Titans, another bad team that will finish 3-13, in a game immediately forgotten.

[jamespotterstouch]

Libidinis Inexplebilis

Libidinis Inexplebilis by jamespotterstouch

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Rated: MA for adult themes/references of rape

¬¬¬ James stood in front of the closed doors of the Headmaster’s office. He’d spent a good five minutes yelling to be let back in before he accepted his situation and started pacing silently, albeit furiously. He was sure he’d worn a trail in the ground by the time the door opened fifteen minutes later.

Dumbledore towered in the doorway before he spoke evenly, “You heard everything relevant to the mission,” he peered over his spectacles knowingly, “Do not question Miss Evans on what was discussed privately. It is her choice alone to volunteer information.”  He turned around facing inside and spoke kindly, “Miss Evans, you may see Poppy if you wish for a Calming Draught. Otherwise, I’ve connected a fireplace in the faculty lounge to return you to headquarters. The password is ‘Cauldron Cakes.’” His robes swooshed in an elegant arc as he allowed Lily to pass, before the passageway closed with an echoing thud.

Dumbledore’s absence revealed an extremely pale Lily, looking like the cloak she was wearing—honestly, why was it so large?—was swallowing her. He could tell even beneath the cloak her arms were crossed in front of her, vaguely—okay, maybe not so vaguely—remembering she always gripped her upper arms when she was especially distraught. It always looked as if she were hugging herself.

“Shall we get you that Calming Draught?” James asked softly. His eyes narrowed when she let out a bark of bitter laughter and he studied her thoughtfully.

“No, I’m sure it won’t help anyways,” Lily replied solemnly. She glanced up and caught him looking at her and quickly dropped her gaze. James noticed she was flexing her hands again and she was trembling. He led the way to the lounge and held the door open for her. She quickly passed and went directly for the floo powder, but hesitated. He recognized the problem immediately and offered her his hand which she took although, he noted petulantly, with a flinch. He had to help her into the fire place because she was shaking so badly. She vanished in a puff of smoke and he quickly followed.

Coughing slightly on arrival, James stepped out of the fireplace and ran right into Lily. He gently steadied her so she wouldn’t fall due to the collision and noticed how stiff she was. At the sound of a fireplace, odd members of the Order typically peeked in to see who had arrived. Interests piqued, they came in to question what in Merlin’s name had happened to Lily on the mission. Lily stood frozen as a cacophony of voices reached her before twirling herself around and throwing herself in to James’ arms. Startled–and perhaps a little pleased–by the feeling of her in his embrace, it took James a few seconds to comprehend she was frantically whispering to him.

“Please,” she pleaded, “take me somewhere else. Anywhere else. I can’t be here!” Instinctively his grip around her tightened in a nostalgic way and he threw an apologetic look at a slightly smug looking Sirius who had just entered the room before apparating away.

James forced himself to release her when they reappeared. With her brilliant green eyes glistening with unshed tears looking up at him and her one hand tightly gripping his shoulder and the other fiercely clutching her overlarge cloak, it had been an extremely difficult decision to let go. Truth be told, she felt wonderful in his arms and he tried not to think about how it had always been that way. She tugged away from him, flexing her hands as that all too familiar flush heated her cheeks. She made a sweep of their surroundings while her face cooled before turning to him with uncertainty.

“Where are we?” she asked curiously.

James shoved a hand through his hair nervously, “We’re at the Potter Manor,” he explained, “It’s the first place I could think of.”

“So this is where you grew up?” Lily asked, her eyes round as she surveyed the room once more. James felt incredibly vulnerable as her piercing eyes inspected his bedroom with a newfound interest. Her eyes drifted across the walls where attached with Spell-O-Tape were various Quidditch posters, Gryffindor paraphernalia, and -damn it he should have taken those down ages ago-crude drawings featuring Sirius’s name on them.  The drapes were drawn tightly shut and the large canopy bed looked familiar and inviting. Strewn across a large wooden writing desk (with the Marauders’ signatures scrawled in everlasting ink) beside the bed were carefully framed photographs. The majority were of him and the Marauders participating in some devilry and thoroughly enjoying it throughout their Hogwarts years. A few though were of James with his parents, the sight of which gave his heart a distinctive ache. Lily’s gaze seemed to linger on those. The burgundy tones of the room brought a certain comfort to him that he’d long ago forgot: the promise of hot chocolate in the early hours before dawn when he couldn’t sleep and his father got up to read the paper before heading off to work; the phantom smell of something burning after his mum read something about home cooked meals being key to raising a well behaved boy and denied assistance from the house elves. His dad was gone now and at his insistence his mum was off visiting some distant relative away from the hotspots of war. That left the entire manor empty and forlorn, and he felt the difference. Granted, he already knew that the house was empty, but knowing and feeling the emptiness were two different things.

Lily, having finished her perusal and inspection of the room, turned slowly and met his eyes briefly before immediately looking down. She flexed her hands again and cautiously made her way to the edge of the mattress and took a seat. She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.She could see Potter was a bit flabbergasted at her not having something to say.

“Would you like me to take your cloak?” he offered, warily.“

No!” she choked, pulling the fabric even tighter around her. Merlin, he probably doesn’t even know why she’s wearing Black’s cloak. She felt even more aware of her nakedness beneath the fabric as he looked at her oddly at the abrupt answer. Thankfully, he didn’t question it. Lily watched him glance around the room awkwardly before he strode purposely over to the desk and dragged the wooden chair in front of her before taking a seat. He sat there, looking at her, patiently waiting. It was borderline unnerving.

Lily swallowed and searched for some semblance of coherency from her thoughts. She didn’t know what to do with the information Dumbledore had given her: the identity of the curse that was cast upon her. She took a steadying breath, “I…” she started and trailed off as she met the hazel eyes that were seemingly piercing her soul.

Damn him.

“I need to tell you--that is, there’s something that I was wondering—bloody hell, I don’t think I can ask you, I mean…damn!..I..” Lily buried her face into her hands and had to take a few steadying breaths. Her resolve strengthened, she met the eyes unflinchingly. How can she even explain this? She thought she had been mortified when Dumbledore kindly gave her the details, when he offered to find her someone to…Gods, but trying to explain it to James and ask him was a billion times worse. “I don’t have much time to explain before the curse goes into effect. The point is, I need you to not say anything until I finish, and I will completely understand if you don’t want to even look at me after I ask…Merlin, this is…”

Lily paused, glancing at James’ face. It was unreadable. His previous posture while waiting for her to speak had been more relaxed. He sat up ramrod straight now and he was unnervingly still. Lily glanced around the room, looking for anything to give her the courage to continue. She found nothing. “Dumbledore said that the spell which was cast on me is the Libidinis Inexplebilis Curse. The Deatheaters use it on witches to, well, it’s for those that are either more squeamish or more cruel, depending on how they use it. It’s a rather antiquated spell, very old magic. Very rarely used, from what I gathered. What it does is it increases the libido of a witch in a debilitating way. It…it forces heightened arousal on them, to the point where it is excruciating if she doesn’t find…release.” Lily flushed, and flexed her hands against her knees. In her peripheral vision, she saw James tense up further, if that was even possible. “The thing is, the release can’t be…self-inflicted.” She took a breath, “Deatheaters who don’t get their kicks through rape typically cast it on witches to guarantee a pseudo-willing participant for what they have planned. Other Deatheaters will cast it on a witch and do nothing. The witch will be unable outlast the spell. If she tries to uhh,” she squeezed her eyes shut briefly “take care of the problem herself, her body will physically cripple itself. If no release is found, the witch will experience severe hemorrhaging and will die.”

Lily looked up and saw nothing but a stony face in response. She hated when he used to do this. He shut down and left her floundering for an inkling of what he was thinking. “I don’t have much more time before the spell takes over. James,” she whispered, and his eyes flashed over with an emotion she couldn’t identify. She cleared her throat, “James, it’s completely unfair of me to even ask, trust me I know. I understand if you say no. I…I don’t even know how to ask it of you. You are the only person that I can…”

She swallowed again. “I can find a wizard escort, if I need to. Of course, I don’t even know if those exist, and who would be the safest to go to?” Lily stood up trembling and extracted herself from between James and the mattress. “I don’t suppose you know anyone who could recommend someone that I can—” Lily’s breath caught with emotion as she started to walk to the fireplace. Her vision was already blurring with tears. She knew how unfair it was to ask him to help her in this way, after all that had happened before. She was trembling all over and she wasn’t sure if it was the oncoming spell beginning to take over or the complete desolation she felt at his reaction. Reaching into the floo powder, she was abruptly stopped by an impossibly strong hand gripping her arm. She willed her tears to dissipate as she slowly looked up to see James staring down at her, eyes flashing murderously and his lips pursed in a thin line.

“Evans,” he started, his voice uncomprehendingly low before he amended, “Lily, are you asking me to--”

“Yes,” she exhaled, “I’m asking you to put aside our differences, our past, and spend the evening with me tonight bringing me to…to...to orgasm as many times as you can so that I don’t bleed out and die.” James brusquely dropped her arm at the utterance of “orgasm.”

“Merlin, Lily!” James swore while dragging a hand through his hair. Lily flexed her hands. “I don’t even—”

“I know.”

“You can’t possibly—”

“I know.”

A steely resolve came over him and he almost growled at her “You’re bonkers if you think I’m selfish enough to make you find a “wizard escort.”

Her heart fluttered.“James, I—”

“No, this time you listen to me and don’t interrupt. If we’re doing this—which we are because I’m not going to let you just die—then there needs to be some ground rules. I will help you, but under no circumstances am I…” He paused and gave a frustrated huff before raking his fingers through his hair. “I have boundaries. It doesn’t matter what they are, because I’m going to stick with them. I’m sure it won’t matter to you what they are as long as you get what you need.” He exhaled air in an exasperated way.

He was startled as Lily rushed into his arms. “Thank you,” she whispered as his arms instinctively wrapped around her waist in a hug. “Thank you so much. You have no idea what it means to me that I have someone who I actually know doing this. Someone whom I care about and cares about me…” Lily bit her lip hard to prevent herself from crying as she buried her face into his chest. His hand smoothed over her hair before pulling her just far enough to face him. He dropped his forehead to meet hers, and closed his eyes.

“How long does it last?” He asked.

“Dumbledore says that it’s all speculation, but is generally agreed to last around three hours.”

He grunted in response and led her back to where they previously had been sitting. He conjured up some glasses of water and doing anything to avoid her gaze. He tried—and failed—to sound casual when he asked “How long before it…starts?”

“Any minute now,” she responded as he came to stand in front of her. She’d been so foolish before. How could she have been so stupid to ruin their friendship…to ruin her chance at love? She’d known it in seventh year, and she knew it to be true now; she absolutely loved this man. She was attracted to him in every way possible.

His unruly, thick black hair that had once made irritated her was absolutely endearing. He would always push his fingers through it when he was stressed or unnerved. It would always cause it to become messier, which always reminded her of what he looked like after they’d spent a morning in bed. His broad shoulders always made her weak-kneed and he’d grown into them even further in the past year. Years as a chaser definitely payed off. His chest was toned further than she had remembered, probably due to the rigorous missions everyone constantly had. She felt a wave of heat hit her that had nothing to do with temperature and her fingers started prickling uncomfortably. The narrow V of his hips acted as a guiding arrow to the muscled thighs. She remembered his unbelievably even tan, all natural, and how it made her mouth water. She wanted him lips on every inch of her skin, and she knew that feeling had nothing to do with the curse; Lily felt this way every time she saw him. He was masculinity in its prime. And all that couldn’t even compare to what was truly attractive about him: his undying loyalty, his kindness and compassion, his damned stubbornness, self-assurance bordering on cockiness, his quick wit, never ending humour, and his ability to find beauty in anything.

“James,” she said, unintentionally leaning towards him. She stopped when he frowned at her.

“Are you wearing Padfoot’s cloak?” he asked, quizzically.

“Uh, yes. I am. He was gentlemanly enough to lend it to me for the evening,” she nervously bit her lip and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

“Why would you need his cloak?” he pressed.

“I,” she cleared her throat, “I told you and Dumbledore what happened when I was captured. They stripped me.”

“They what?!” he bellowed, eyes narrowing.

“They took my clothes, James,” Lily rephrased, articulating the sentence slowly so he could comprehend in. Her reply was immediately answered with a string of curses.

“When you said they stripped you, I thought you meant of your wand!” He swiped a hand through his hair vigorously.

“Well, they did that too,” she confirmed, tugging the cloak tighter in the front, “Black was kind enough to give it to me before we left because it was col—”

Lily froze in the middle of the word when James whipped around and appraised her. “Padfoot could have easily transfigured a cloak,” his voice was low and made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle, “he could have easily transfigured a cloak out of something else you were wearing. Why didn’t he do that?” James took a step even closer to Lily. She tried to retreat a step but the back of her knees were already hitting the end of the mattress. She tried to find something to steady herself with. The something happened to be him. She was pressed against him before she knew it.

“He…he could have if I had been wearing something,” Lily whispered. Her hands felt like they were being stabbed by thousands of little knives.

He leaned down so his mouth was even with her ear. She shivered as she felt his warm breath exhaled against her neck. “Do you mean to tell me the entire time we’ve been talking, you’ve been…?”

Merlin, he had to know what he was doing was sending off fireworks in her spine. He had to remember how sensitive her neck was. The scent of his cologne enveloped her and her knees buckled. James easily steadied her with his arm around her waist. She couldn’t even think…he was so close to her and she could feel the muscles in his arm flex as he supported her. She loved his arms being around her. Oh, for all that was holy, he needed to take a step back before she did something completely outrageous.

“Lily?” he murmured, and she could feel the vibration of his voice in his chest. She couldn’t remember how to talk with him pressed against her. She did the only thing she could think of to answer his question: she unfastened the ties the held the front of the cloak together as quickly as she could and shrugged it back, allowing it to drape beneath her shoulders and reveal her bare skin.

“James…” she breathed, but said nothing further when he let out an aroused groan and captured her mouth with his.

[patrick-watson]

Why Investors May Soon Be In For A Rude Awakening

BY PATRICK WATSON

It seems that a lot of people have missed the distinction between wishful thinking and reality lately—and I fear it’s going to hurt them badly.

After Donald Trump won in November, some Americans didn’t just hope for the best; they thought it was here.

The euphoria is visible in the Small Business Optimism Index.

(Source: NFIB)

Confidence spiked higher following the election because surely, people thought, an all-Republican White House and Congress would waste no time ushering in business-friendly policy changes.

While that was a reasonable conclusion, now it looks like small-business owners may have let their political excitement affect their common sense.

The jury isn’t in yet on how massive the changes are going to be. And the NFIB index hasn’t pulled back much, so respondents seem to be patient so far.

You could say the same for investors. Stock benchmarks rose after the election, particularly in regulated sectors like banking and energy, because investors believed policy changes would lead to higher earnings.

I was less confident, and said so in my December letter that we’ll get some tax cuts and deregulation. But they can’t possibly do as much as some people expect for 2017.

I’m still convinced that’s true—and the "rude awakening" may be even closer now.

Is the Economy a coiled spring like it was for Reagan?

In that same issue, I showed the following decision tree from one of Louis Gave’s epic Gavekal Research presentations. Even now, it’s still a good analytical guide:

Source: GavekalResearch

Answering two questions leads you to one of four scenarios, each with a different investment strategy.

Does the US economy have pent-up growth potential that a Trump presidency can unlock?

Will the Fed tighten monetary policy aggressively?

Let’s think about these in order.

If the US economy is a coiled spring ready to surge, it has a strange way of showing it. Even the most optimistic projections show real GDP growth for 2017 will be little better than last year’s disappointing 1.6%.

I think our economy is the opposite of a coiled spring.

It’s been stretched past its limits by debt. Aside from insane federal, state, and local government debt, we owe trillions more in credit card, auto, student loan, and mortgage loans. That stands in the way of any meaningful expansion.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument the economy really wants to grow, and all it needs is a little nudge from the government. Are those policy changes right around the corner?

I don’t think so.

100 Days of Gridlock

The Trump administration’s first 100 days are running out, and we have yet to see any major legislation pass.

The Obamacare repeal/replace plan is still on the table but not doing well. The GOP is divided at least three ways. Compromises that would bring more conservatives aboard repel the moderates—and vice versa.

Plus, the healthcare reform bill wasn’t just healthcare. It would have eliminated the Obamacare taxes on higher-income Americans… and its Medicaid cuts were going to offset lower corporate tax rates in other legislation. Now that’s much harder.

Scratch healthcare and tax reform off the list.

Bank deregulation? That’s going nowhere. We hear talk about amending the Dodd-Frank Act, but nothing concrete is happening.

Worse, the Trump administration still hasn’t gained control of key regulatory agencies. As of now, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) only has two commissioners. One is a Democrat. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is similarly split.

Banks can’t count on much administrative relief until the president gets his people in control of the regulatory agencies—and that’s nowhere on the radar right now.

Infrastructure stimulus? It’s bogged down in a debate how to pay for it. Last week, Trump told the New York Times he would consider borrowing “much more” than $300 billion for infrastructure projects.

You can imagine how GOP deficit hawks loved that idea. It won’t mesh well with their desire to cut tax rates without adding more debt.

Trump has talked about making deals with Democrats if he can’t get enough Republican votes to pass his bills. But Democrats have little reason to cooperate. Their base voters are energized against Trump and won’t stand for it.

Bottom line:

Congress has no majority favoring any of the changes that made investors and business owners so optimistic after the election.

The Trump White House has a lot to do and is still trying to get organized.

Instead of a unified Republican government, we have near-total gridlock.

I think the answer to our first question, “Does the US economy have pent-up growth potential that a Trump presidency can unlock?” is clearly “no.” Scratch Louis Gave’s scenarios 1 and 2 off the list.

As for the Fed…

The Fed’s “Tightening” Path

The policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) spent last year building up its nerve for more rate hikes. It gave us one in December and another in March, and more are coming.

The Fed is clearly on a tightening path, but is it "aggressively" so? That’s not as clear.

We saw in the March dot plots that even the most hawkish FOMC member thinks the longer-term federal funds rate will only rise to 3.75%. Other estimates came in at 3% or lower. That’s “tight” only compared to years of near-zero rates.

Of course, 3% rates might feel tight to a generation of Millennial traders who have never seen anything like it before.

But that’s not all.

The March FOMC minutes, released last week, showed the Fed is seriously considering how it will unload its bloated bond portfolio. They could start letting assets roll off without replacement later this year, which could have more impact than rate hikes.

Looking back at the decision tree, I think the No/Yes path is the most likely. The economy isn’t ready to surge, but the Fed will tighten policy anyway. Not a good combination, but I’m in the minority.

Most investors still have their bets on Yes/Yes. Some are starting to get nervous. Given events in Washington, they should be.

Here’s the Hard, Cold Reality

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but here’s reality as I see it.

There will be no tax cuts this year.

Banks won’t get much regulatory relief.

Obamacare will likely collapse with no replacement ready.

Any infrastructure stimulus is way off in the future.

The Fed is tightening because it thinks an economy that grew only 1.6% last year is overheating.

It doesn’t matter if we’d like this to happen. It is what’s coming, in my opinion.

I haven’t even mentioned other flash points: a potential government shutdown after April 28, more military action overseas, or trade conflicts with China and other countries.

I also haven’t mentioned the assorted Russia-related investigations. Whatever happened in the election, the fallout is distracting both the White House and Congress.

I’ve thought about what could possibly change all this for the better. Nothing comes to mind.

Recent reports suggest Trump wants to shake up his White House team. That may help, but he’s already lost of lot of time and political capital.

It All Depends on Q1 Earnings

To me, this situation feels like a slow-motion train wreck where all you can do is watch.

Much depends on the 1Q earnings reports that are starting to flow. Good results from high-profile companies might buy a little more time. Unexpectedly bad results from big names could put on the brakes.

Washington's monumental gridlock is on a collision course with investors' blind euphoria. We’re all on one train or the other. Hold on tight.

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[satans-codpiece]

ok fr im gonna post this bc this is amazing @ 16 y/o me, what happened to you? selfshipping with a character not a single person on this hell of an earth cares about while staring the entire SPN cast straight in the eyes and being like fuck y’all?

[December 27th, 2012]

HE hadn't thought dying would feel quite like this. Or maybe he did, to an extent. Weightless, like he was floating was to be expected, feeling lightheaded, especially as the almost blinding light blasted from the stone. "It wall went white" doesn't have the same ring to it, though. He had seen that poor woman earlier be vaporized by the stone's power, and he was sure that was what was happening to him right now. Individual atomic bonds being ripped apart by the raw energy being thrown off by Stonehenge.

Even as an astrophysicist he hadn't expected to die such an unpredictable death. Maybe in an accidental atomic explosion at the worst, maybe get cancer or something. Much domestic deaths available than this seemed almost appealing, but in the end, he had saved the world in his death. He knew that long before he left the car with Dr. Jennings. He would die at Stonehenge, even if he failed. Getting the key to the center rock would cause what was happening: this discharge of power on a much smaller scale than the one hat would've occurred had he failed. The one that would redirect the atomic bomb, and then the one after procuring enough of the magnetic power from the Earth's poles.

That was why he left his ring with Dr. Jennings, and faked hope when she said she'd be giving it back. He would never see her again. A chestful of anticipation and the weight of quite possibly the literal world rested on his shoulders and he set out with determination.

Which he was successful and lead to this feeling of weightlessness, of falling even. To be honest he hadn't even realized he was falling until he realized his side and leg burned with pain. He had thought with just enough clarity to think that wasn't the pain supposed to stop once your brain had been picked apart one atomic-level bond at a time? Weren't you supposed to stop thinking? And in that moment he opened his eyes and he could swear on every book of astrophysical theory that he was actually falling. The light spiralling around his was not his near death experience, he was actually falling Goddamn it all. Hell, for all he knew he was actually being taken to see who the hell made Stonehenge and the key and terraformed Earth in the first place billions of years ago. He admitted earlier that there were forces they simply couldn't explain with modern theories, and maybe even any theories to ever trickle through peer reviews. Maybe they had something else at work in their terraforming device, they wouldn't even have to know.

The weightlessness was expected, the falling was a bit of a surprise but still could maybe to chalked up to last-minute hallucinations in an attempt to keep his mind in a single piece. It was the collision of his back to a very solid, very hard surface that had Dr. Glaser sputtering and trying to keep his focus on the material world.

Landing had jostled his already tender gunshot wound, and he groaned despite himself. This was so much less graceful than just being ripped apart or vaporized. He really hoped that at least the cult follower was being as disgraced as himself. Maybe a little more dead, since he did after all wish death upon all the humans in the world. That wasn't very nice.

Jacob stared up from his position on what he assumed was the ground of some abandoned building. The walls were concrete, maybe in a basement somewhere- supposing it was of human origins. The walls were old and a dingy gray, obviously uncared for and let to fall into disrepair. On the ceiling, however, Jacob could not comment since above him was only a swirling vortex of light and color: one that he had obviously just fallen from. He thought for perhaps a moment he had fallen through some sort of wormhole, created by the extreme energy at the stone and forced a counterpart white hole somewhere and had sucked him through. Though that hardly explained how he was still alive: a black hole would crush him under the extreme internal gravity. Not to mention it would also be ripping apart Europe by now.

No, Dr. Glaser was contented to ponder on how he got here as he bled to death slowly. It was a sad death, he thought. He much preferred being vaporized to this, at least in being vaporized he could hope someone would make a movie for him one day, with decent special effects for being vaporized. He could be famous, but no, like this he would be that one scientist that ends up being found in 30 years and then accused of faking his death for publicity. At the scale of everything that had happened surely it would be even more incredible than if they had found Hitler's body in South America. He pondered it a moment more.

Maybe not quite that sensational. It would certainly still rattle the gossiping TV shows for a couple weeks. No, he contented to pressing a hand to his wound which still oozed warm blood over his fingers and into this clothing. Judging from the state of the room and likelihood that he was in an evacuated zone, he hadn't expected anyone to show up. He certainly did not expect a loud cry of "Jesus Christ! Sam, Cas! Get in here!"

Actually he was expecting to really be hallucinating that. He looked lazily, the blood loss finally digging at his consciousness, and saw a large pair of too-green eyes staring back at him. The man, - oh God, Jacob could swear he looks just like Jensen Ackles, the American actor, pushes Jacob's hand out of the way to press a cloth to his wound. "Hey man, it's going to be okay, alright?" Jacob's head is too blurry to really understand what's going on, but is clear enough to know that that tone is more like 'I'm saying this so you wont freak out on me' than 'its okay'.

He expected to die anyway so it's all good. Maybe not with an actor trying to keep his blood inside his body, but hey it'll only make the story even better. He could probably get by with better last words than "It was a robot head", but he could settle for dying in an actor's basement. The man turned around again and yelled: "Sam! Cas!"

This time another man appeared from a doorway, rushing over to the first. He was remarkably tall, Jacob knew for certain even from his state on the floor. And now maybe Jacob could start having a panic attack or laughing off this hallucination because god dammit the other man was fucking Jared Padalecki. So either he was dying on the set of Supernatural, or something was definitely off. He recalled distantly that he had called him Sam, not Jared. And now he was sure he was hallucinating: this was absurdly nuts. Yeah, maybe Sabrina had told him that it was real and she was stuck on the wrong side, but come on. She was having some sort of mental breakdown when she said that. She'd said his alternate on the other side was an angel but this was stupid, this was ridiculous.

"Oh my god, Dean, he looks just like..." Jared (Sam?) mumbled, grabbing a hold of the wound on Jacob's leg. Dean- Jensen- nodded somewhere between numbly and grimly. And then around the corner came another body. Oh Christ, why would this have to be his pre-death hallucination, why couldn't he be receiving his award for astrophysics again, that would be nice.

"Move," The Jacob lookalike said, voice way too low and gravelly to be correct with his body. But they moved and Cas(?) moved in close, squinting at Jacob and all Jacob could was try to not cough up any blood that he felt trickling in his throat. Cas pressed two fingers the Jacob's temple and -now its certain he's hallucinating, but whatever- he was just fine. He gasped, happy to not feel restricted by the pain in his abdomen.

"What do we do...?" Sam began, looking helplessly between Cas and Dean. Jacob was still trying to sort his thoughts.

"Do you know Sariel?" Cas questioned, and it took him a moment to realize his lookalike was talking to him. He thought over a minute. Sariel? No, he didn't think he knew any and shook his head accordingly, too stunned for words.

"If she was stuck on the other side would she even be using her real name? Wouldn't she pick something else so she wouldn't, you know, stand out?"

Jacob could piece that together. Stuck on the otherside and there even being a Jacob alternate? He breathed in through his mouth, expecting it to feel tight and dry and shocked to feel it wet and edging on normal. He worked out, "Sabrina,"

The trio looked down at him. "This is another.. world, right?" They exchanged glances and shrugged, a unison of 'more or less'. "Sabrina Jennings, she said she was,"

The surprised yelp from above was all the warning he got as a body was falling much too quickly from the ceiling to stop. It landed heavily with a thick 'thump' on Jacob's middle, making his cough and sputter.

[December 28th, 2012]

"Oooh, I think I'm dying..."

"You are not dying, Sariel."

"You don't know that, ughh, this feels so awful. Won't you help me Jacob?" "No, just taken some more Nyquil, you're fine. You have the flu." I rolled onto my other side and mustered up my best kicked puppy dog look. "Jacob, won't you please go get it for me...?"

He turned around to glared at me, frustrated and tired with my antics. I really did feel horrible, more than what I expected the "flu" to feel like: more accurately I felt like death personified. I ached all over and moving at all left me terribly nauseousness. I'd never felt anything like it, Angelic or otherwise. Hell, I wasn't supposed to be able to get sick. I may have only partially fallen but that implied I was still partially an Angel and as a part angel being, I shouldn't be able to get sick with such human diseases, right? surely that was in my contract. Maybe

I probably should've read the fine print. I didn't even bother reading the shortened juicier version. Not that this metaphorical contract existed, that's why its metaphorical. I just didn't bother to actually consider what would actually happen if I ripped half my grace out (closer to two thirds, I still had a single pair of wings, not all three). I felt temperature and was bothered by it (I took to wearing several pairs of socks in the winter), I needed food occasionally, I slept a little off and on (maybe 3 hours a night, easily looked over). I hadn't even thought that sickness could also claim my much more fragile body.

I was still angelic enough that it would require a heavenly blade to kill me, I knew that for certain after I tripped and stabbed myself one evening. Whether it still took an archangels' blade or if any lackey could kill me was a mystery I wasn't too keen on figuring out. Being dipped in holy oil would probably fry me, which is such a pity.

But sickness is another thing all together, there were a handful of diseases that could affect angels. Mostly they attached to the wings: the most sensitive part of any angel, arch- or not. They were akin to birds' diseases, but the difference was simple. We could rid ourselves of them almost instantaneously. I'd only heard of cherubs being stuck with their sickness for a while, and even then they are so far down the food chain it isn't surprising. They're barely above humans, only capable of flight and hiding themselves from human view. They don't even require vessels.

But the flu, oh the flu. I had kept the part of my grace the healed, which seemed to be useless now, unable to rid my vessel which was essentially now my body, of this virus. Or whatever it was. It wasn't pleasant, I knew that. I ached all over to the very core of my being and even trying to press my grace against the wound-less pains seemed to be useless. I felt cold all the time and yet my body burned inside, and I was partially worried I was becoming Lucifer: burning cold and vessel flushed hot in attempts to press my grace and form out of its physical self. I slept much more, a full 8 hours which Jacob had explained was normal for humans to sleep more when they were sick. It meant their body was working overtime to try to push the stuff that was making you sick out. He swore to show me a movie he called Osmosis Jones, "Even though it's inaccurate in so many ways, it's pretty funny." I didn't really pay attention. I liked almost every movie he'd shown me thus far even though I hadn't seen a whole lot. Only maybe 50ish, and that was being generous. I guess for being around for a year on Earth, that was pretty good.

But this sickness was not "pretty good". It was horrible. I don't know how humans dealt with this as a possibility every winter. I snuggled deeper into the bed, pulling the blankets up to my nose and Jacob seemed to understand that getting up really would send my nausea into overload again. (Last time I had tried to move ended with me curled up on the floor with my head between my legs, crying out of my misery). I left the room for a minute, and I coughed roughly. Dry and it ripped at my throat, I grumbled something about probably using all my archangel abilities, as soon as I got them back, into wiping out the flu virus. This was a perfect example of grade A suckage.

I sniffled and suddenly a bluish greenish liquid in a clear bottle was being thrust at me. Jacob held it out while I took it from it, opened the top and took a large drink of it. He raised an eyebrow and I shrugged. I still had resistance to much of humanities drugs, making going to the doctor especially weird. Jacob had feigned flu as well to get a double dose of Tamaflu, whatever that was. He said I should probably just double the dose and anymore and he'd be worried about its effects on me.

So far I didn't feel any better. Doubling the amount of any medicine I took never seemed to do the trick, at tripling I got trickles of effects, mostly little things. Six ibuprofen and I noted that I didn't want to tear my spine out quite as much. It took ten to really make me relax and be able to think about anything besides it.

I screwed the cap back on and held it out to him again. He took it and set it upon the night stand. He sighed and ran a hand over my forehead, his palm feeling cool against my skin. "I'm sorry you're sick, Sariel." He cooed softly. He leaned down and kissed my forehead.

I stifled a cough and mumbled, "Yeah well, don't get yourself sick too, I can't take care of you like you take care of me... I wouldn't even be able to heal it out of you."

He laughed and stroked a hand through my hair, "I can't get the flu."

I barely contained the shock in my voice: "What? how?"

He grinned and shook it head. "Unlike you, I got my flu shot."

[preciousmetals0]

The Chinese Time Bomb; Tesla Tendies Time

The Chinese Time Bomb; Tesla Tendies Time:

The Ticking Chinese Time Bomb

Sorry to ruin your bull market party, but there’s an issue we need to discuss … like, right now.

I’m talking about the Wuhan coronavirus and the U.S.-China “phase 1” trade deal.

Here’s the thing: More than 20,000 Chinese are infected with the Wuhan virus, with some 427 dead. Tens of millions are quarantined in the country. Productivity is grinding to a snail’s pace.

The situation has grown so dire that 24 Chinese municipalities and regions have told businesses to halt all operations until February 10. Maybe they hope the worst will pass by then? Seems like a crapshoot to me.

Anyway, those 24 regions accounted for 80% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 90% of all exports last year. That’s huge, and it’s sure to impact China’s economic growth in the first quarter.

But by how much?

“We are thinking in the region of 3.8% year-over-year, and again plugging in those numbers, we’re looking at year-over-year growth of probably less than 2%,” says Pantheon Macroeconomics Chief Asia Economist Freya Beamish.

First, that’s quite a title there, Freya. I mean, wow…

Second, remember when everyone was biting their nails over last year’s slowing growth? China reported 6.1% GDP growth in 2019, and the markets dipped. Chinese GDP growth of less than 2% would be a serious stunner for the global economy.

And we haven’t even addressed the U.S.-China trade deal. Speaking of which, how will China make good on its promise to buy an extra $200 billion worth of U.S. goods in the next two years amid the Wuhan virus epidemic?

It won’t. China will have to invoke a clause in the trade agreement that allows for leniency in the event of a natural disaster. That clause involves a face-to-face meeting between the two countries, and nobody knows how President Trump will respond to such a request.

The Takeaway: 

If you don’t think this virus outbreak will impact the U.S. economy, I’ve got some bad news for you.

Even if the worst of the Wuhan virus remains contained within China, that’s the second-largest economy on the planet we’re talking about! Nearly every major U.S. manufacturer, chipmaker and goods supplier has a supply or manufacturing chain that involves China at some point.

Furthermore, if China moves ahead with asking for leniency in the phase 1 trade deal, that’s $200 billion in purchases that will be delayed for U.S. companies.

As much as we hate to admit it, the U.S. economy is closely tied to Chinese growth. Sure, we’re trying to move away from that … but you just can’t switch some supply lines in such a short time frame. This situation will have an impact on U.S. growth. Just how much remains to be seen.

Right now, you should keep a close eye on the Wall Street Goliaths with close Chinese ties — big names like Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO).

While the China situation won’t sink these companies, it could slow growth, which is bad news for any investor.

Remember what I told you after Facebook Inc.’s (Nasdaq: FB) ho-hum earnings? The glory days are gone for the market’s slowing Goliaths … and it’s game on for the high-growth “Davids” sweeping in. (See what I did there?)

No one can spot these high-growth Davids with the guts to take on Wall Street’s mighty giants like Charles Mizrahi. In fact, Charles’ knack for finding underdog stocks has helped him find 48 winning stocks in a row.

48? In a row?!

Yes, dear readers … in a row. And it’s all thanks to one investment secret that Charles is finally ready to unveil.

Click here to see how Charles’ best-kept investment secret can help turn your financial goals and dreams into reality.

The Good: FN Great Results

While everyone else focused on the 5G “Spectrum” wars, Fabrinet (NYSE: FN) quietly helped build out the back-end network. What? You didn’t think that the existing hard lines would support this jump to 5G speed, did you? You need fiber in those back-end channels, boy! Copper won’t cut it anymore.

This morning, fiber-optic specialist Fabrinet posted impressive second-quarter results. You might even say they were fabrilous! (Or you might not … whatever.)

For the fourth consecutive quarter, Fabrinet trounced Wall Street’s expectations. Earnings topped the consensus target by $0.07 per share, with revenue beating by more than 3% at $426.2 million.

What’s more, Fabrinet projected third-quarter revenue to land between $410 million and $418 million. The company said it was being cautious due to the Wuhan virus outbreak, but it still surrounded the consensus target for $415 million in revenue.

The bottom line: If you’re looking for 5G investments, Fabrinet should be on your short list — if it’s not already in your portfolio.

The Bad: A, B, See Ya Later, Google!

Even a lower tax bill couldn’t save Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) this quarter.

The Google parent topped earnings estimates (thanks to said tax breaks) but missed revenue expectations due to poor hardware sales and lower ad revenue.

Google Properties (which includes Gmail, Google Play and YouTube) saw revenue rise 18.5% to $31.9 billion — some $100 million short of expectations. Furthermore, traffic-acquisition costs rose a greater-than-expected 14% during the quarter. Rising traffic costs — i.e., the cost Google pays to partner websites — have been a thorn in Google’s side for some time now.

On the positive side, cloud computing revenue surged 53%, and YouTube revenue jumped 31%.

Still, the report left Alphabet investors searching for more. What they found, however, was a formal European investigation into how Google handles location data. We can add that to the growing pile of investigations and inquiries. That’s got to make investors feel all warm and fuzzy.

The Ugly: Tesla Tendies

What in the wild, wild world of electric vehicles is a-goin’ on here?

As you all well know, I’m a Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) bull … but come on!

TSLA shares are up more than 100% since the beginning of the year. Today, the stock breached $900. Short sellers lost more than $2.5 billion on Monday alone. This is insanity.

I get that there’s been a lot of really good news on Tesla lately. From better-than-expected earnings to Panasonic earnings (it’s all about batteries) to a $7,000 price target … Tesla has had a serious influx of bullish sentiment.

But the company’s $163.3 billion market cap puts it just behind Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM), making it the second most valuable car company on the planet.

Tesla’s fundamentals just don’t support these levels — there, I said it. What we’re seeing is a good old-fashioned short squeeze. Despite the recent run-up, more than 18% of Tesla’s outstanding shares remain sold short. These are some real troopers here. But how much more pain can they withstand?

After all, it’s not a question of if Tesla will correct at this point … it’s a matter of when. The problem is that TSLA could top $1,000 before all is said and done. If that happens, the shares will likely hit $1,500 before all of the remaining short sellers are crushed to a pulp.

I can’t tell you what to do if you hold TSLA shares. But I will remind you that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I will say that it feels like we’re nearing a top for Tesla. I hope you have collision insurance for when things eventually go pear-shaped.

Last week, Great Stuff had its first-ever reader poll!

We asked: On a scale of 1 to 5, how much does social responsibility (aka “green investing”) play a part in your portfolio?

Given how much reader feedback I get on so-called green companies, I expected … well, I didn’t expect this:

60% of you don’t factor in social responsibility at all in your investing.

I have to say, I’m a bit flabbergasted. (I really like that word. Thank you for giving me a chance to use it!)

That said, I’m really looking forward to the results from this week’s poll. It’ll be in your inbox tomorrow!

Great Stuff: Not at All?

It’s that time again!

That’s right, it’s time to feed the Great Stuff beast!

We’ve got some hot topics to discuss this week, so be sure to write in to GreatStuffToday@banyanhill.com and let us know your thoughts!

Here are some of this week’s topics:

“Not at all?” Really? Green investing is one of the hottest topics on Wall Street, but are Great Stuff readers truly not interested? (We’re really interested in this topic … do tell!)

How high do you think Tesla will rally before it crashes?

How are you preparing for the fallout from the Wuhan virus? (Or are you preparing at all?)

Now, you know the drill. You have about two days to drop me a line at GreatStuffToday@banyanhill.com to make this week’s edition of Reader Feedback.

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Great Stuff on social media. If you can’t get enough meme-y trade war goodness, follow Great Stuff on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

[goldira01]

The Ticking Chinese Time Bomb

Sorry to ruin your bull market party, but there’s an issue we need to discuss … like, right now.

I’m talking about the Wuhan coronavirus and the U.S.-China “phase 1” trade deal.

Here’s the thing: More than 20,000 Chinese are infected with the Wuhan virus, with some 427 dead. Tens of millions are quarantined in the country. Productivity is grinding to a snail’s pace.

The situation has grown so dire that 24 Chinese municipalities and regions have told businesses to halt all operations until February 10. Maybe they hope the worst will pass by then? Seems like a crapshoot to me.

Anyway, those 24 regions accounted for 80% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 90% of all exports last year. That’s huge, and it’s sure to impact China’s economic growth in the first quarter.

But by how much?

“We are thinking in the region of 3.8% year-over-year, and again plugging in those numbers, we’re looking at year-over-year growth of probably less than 2%,” says Pantheon Macroeconomics Chief Asia Economist Freya Beamish.

First, that’s quite a title there, Freya. I mean, wow…

Second, remember when everyone was biting their nails over last year’s slowing growth? China reported 6.1% GDP growth in 2019, and the markets dipped. Chinese GDP growth of less than 2% would be a serious stunner for the global economy.

And we haven’t even addressed the U.S.-China trade deal. Speaking of which, how will China make good on its promise to buy an extra $200 billion worth of U.S. goods in the next two years amid the Wuhan virus epidemic?

It won’t. China will have to invoke a clause in the trade agreement that allows for leniency in the event of a natural disaster. That clause involves a face-to-face meeting between the two countries, and nobody knows how President Trump will respond to such a request.

The Takeaway: 

If you don’t think this virus outbreak will impact the U.S. economy, I’ve got some bad news for you.

Even if the worst of the Wuhan virus remains contained within China, that’s the second-largest economy on the planet we’re talking about! Nearly every major U.S. manufacturer, chipmaker and goods supplier has a supply or manufacturing chain that involves China at some point.

Furthermore, if China moves ahead with asking for leniency in the phase 1 trade deal, that’s $200 billion in purchases that will be delayed for U.S. companies.

As much as we hate to admit it, the U.S. economy is closely tied to Chinese growth. Sure, we’re trying to move away from that … but you just can’t switch some supply lines in such a short time frame. This situation will have an impact on U.S. growth. Just how much remains to be seen.

Right now, you should keep a close eye on the Wall Street Goliaths with close Chinese ties — big names like Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO).

While the China situation won’t sink these companies, it could slow growth, which is bad news for any investor.

Remember what I told you after Facebook Inc.’s (Nasdaq: FB) ho-hum earnings? The glory days are gone for the market’s slowing Goliaths … and it’s game on for the high-growth “Davids” sweeping in. (See what I did there?)

No one can spot these high-growth Davids with the guts to take on Wall Street’s mighty giants like Charles Mizrahi. In fact, Charles’ knack for finding underdog stocks has helped him find 48 winning stocks in a row.

48? In a row?!

Yes, dear readers … in a row. And it’s all thanks to one investment secret that Charles is finally ready to unveil.

Click here to see how Charles’ best-kept investment secret can help turn your financial goals and dreams into reality.

The Good: FN Great Results

While everyone else focused on the 5G “Spectrum” wars, Fabrinet (NYSE: FN) quietly helped build out the back-end network. What? You didn’t think that the existing hard lines would support this jump to 5G speed, did you? You need fiber in those back-end channels, boy! Copper won’t cut it anymore.

This morning, fiber-optic specialist Fabrinet posted impressive second-quarter results. You might even say they were fabrilous! (Or you might not … whatever.)

For the fourth consecutive quarter, Fabrinet trounced Wall Street’s expectations. Earnings topped the consensus target by $0.07 per share, with revenue beating by more than 3% at $426.2 million.

What’s more, Fabrinet projected third-quarter revenue to land between $410 million and $418 million. The company said it was being cautious due to the Wuhan virus outbreak, but it still surrounded the consensus target for $415 million in revenue.

The bottom line: If you’re looking for 5G investments, Fabrinet should be on your short list — if it’s not already in your portfolio.

The Bad: A, B, See Ya Later, Google!

Even a lower tax bill couldn’t save Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) this quarter.

The Google parent topped earnings estimates (thanks to said tax breaks) but missed revenue expectations due to poor hardware sales and lower ad revenue.

Google Properties (which includes Gmail, Google Play and YouTube) saw revenue rise 18.5% to $31.9 billion — some $100 million short of expectations. Furthermore, traffic-acquisition costs rose a greater-than-expected 14% during the quarter. Rising traffic costs — i.e., the cost Google pays to partner websites — have been a thorn in Google’s side for some time now.

On the positive side, cloud computing revenue surged 53%, and YouTube revenue jumped 31%.

Still, the report left Alphabet investors searching for more. What they found, however, was a formal European investigation into how Google handles location data. We can add that to the growing pile of investigations and inquiries. That’s got to make investors feel all warm and fuzzy.

The Ugly: Tesla Tendies

What in the wild, wild world of electric vehicles is a-goin’ on here?

As you all well know, I’m a Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) bull … but come on!

TSLA shares are up more than 100% since the beginning of the year. Today, the stock breached $900. Short sellers lost more than $2.5 billion on Monday alone. This is insanity.

I get that there’s been a lot of really good news on Tesla lately. From better-than-expected earnings to Panasonic earnings (it’s all about batteries) to a $7,000 price target … Tesla has had a serious influx of bullish sentiment.

But the company’s $163.3 billion market cap puts it just behind Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM), making it the second most valuable car company on the planet.

Tesla’s fundamentals just don’t support these levels — there, I said it. What we’re seeing is a good old-fashioned short squeeze. Despite the recent run-up, more than 18% of Tesla’s outstanding shares remain sold short. These are some real troopers here. But how much more pain can they withstand?

After all, it’s not a question of if Tesla will correct at this point … it’s a matter of when. The problem is that TSLA could top $1,000 before all is said and done. If that happens, the shares will likely hit $1,500 before all of the remaining short sellers are crushed to a pulp.

I can’t tell you what to do if you hold TSLA shares. But I will remind you that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

I will say that it feels like we’re nearing a top for Tesla. I hope you have collision insurance for when things eventually go pear-shaped.

Last week, Great Stuff had its first-ever reader poll!

We asked: On a scale of 1 to 5, how much does social responsibility (aka “green investing”) play a part in your portfolio?

Given how much reader feedback I get on so-called green companies, I expected … well, I didn’t expect this:

60% of you don’t factor in social responsibility at all in your investing.

I have to say, I’m a bit flabbergasted. (I really like that word. Thank you for giving me a chance to use it!)

That said, I’m really looking forward to the results from this week’s poll. It’ll be in your inbox tomorrow!

Great Stuff: Not at All?

It’s that time again!

That’s right, it’s time to feed the Great Stuff beast!

We’ve got some hot topics to discuss this week, so be sure to write in to GreatStuffToday@banyanhill.com and let us know your thoughts!

Here are some of this week’s topics:

“Not at all?” Really? Green investing is one of the hottest topics on Wall Street, but are Great Stuff readers truly not interested? (We’re really interested in this topic … do tell!)

How high do you think Tesla will rally before it crashes?

How are you preparing for the fallout from the Wuhan virus? (Or are you preparing at all?)

Now, you know the drill. You have about two days to drop me a line at GreatStuffToday@banyanhill.com to make this week’s edition of Reader Feedback.

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Great Stuff on social media. If you can’t get enough meme-y trade war goodness, follow Great Stuff on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

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NYC Whiplash Injury Attorney

Do you have whiplash because you were involved in a car accident in New York City? Contact Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C. for immediate assistance. Our experienced NYC whiplash injury lawyers will explain your rights and help you determine the best strategy for recovering compensation. We’ll do everything we can to recover maximum damages on your behalf.

Our NYC law firm offers a free consultation, so don’t hesitate to reach out to schedule yours today.

Why Should I Call Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C. If I Have Whiplash?

Whiplash is one of the most common car accident-related injuries. Even mild cases can cause a lot of pain and make your life really difficult. If someone else is at least partly responsible for the traffic accident that caused your whiplash injury, they should be held accountable. That’s where the NYC personal injury lawyers at Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C. can help. 

For more than 40 years, the legal team at Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C. has been standing up for accident victims across the city. Between us, we have 200 years of combined experience handling cases like yours. We know that at-fault parties and insurance companies won’t just agree to hand over a check for all of your damages. We’re prepared to do whatever it takes to make them pay. Our tenacious approach and dedication to clients like you are why we’ve been able to recover more than $1 Billion in awards.

When you call Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C. for help with your personal injury case, we will:

Investigate the circumstances of the accident that caused your whiplash injury

Establish causation and fault

Seek damages from all liable parties

Bring in experts to help us build a solid evidence-backed case

Negotiate with insurers on your behalf, and

Have our skilled NYC trial lawyers represent you in court, if need be.

We know that whiplash can really interfere with your life. It can take a while to get back on your feet. That’s why we’ll handle all aspects of your whiplash injury case. You focus on your physical recovery while we focus on the financial one. Give us a call today to learn more.

What is Whiplash?

Whiplash is a neck injury that’s most commonly associated with rear-end car accidents. It happens when you experience a forceful trauma that causes your neck to whip back and forth (or side to side) rapidly. As a result of this rapid movement, the neck overextends beyond its typical range of motion. This overextension often results in pain and limited mobility.

How Common is Whiplash? Who is Most Vulnerable?

Every year, there are roughly 3 million reported cases of whiplash in the United States. That’s about 342 whiplash injuries an hour.

Interestingly, women are about 5 times more likely to suffer a whiplash injury than men. Children are also more likely to suffer whiplash than adults. Experts believe that women and children are more vulnerable to whiplash injuries because their necks are smaller than adult males.

Individuals with pre-existing injuries or health conditions are also more susceptible to whiplash injuries if they’re involved in an accident. The risk is even higher for adults between the ages of 30 and 50.

What Causes Whiplash?

Car accidents – particularly rear-end crashes – are considered to be one of the leading causes of whiplash injuries. That’s particularly true in cities like New York, where rear-end collisions are quite common. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be in a high-speed auto accident to suffer whiplash. In fact, crashes where the vehicle(s) are going no more than 5 or 10 MPH can create enough force to cause whiplash.

Motor vehicle accidents aren’t the only reason people suffer from whiplash. Other traumatic events, including assaults and accidents while playing sports such as football or basketball can also cause whiplash.

What Are the Signs and Symptoms of Whiplash?

Common signs and symptoms of whiplash include:

Neck pain

Headache

Stiff neck

Limited mobility in the neck, shoulders, or arms

Weakness in the arms

Jaw pain

Tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and

Dizziness.

Always seek medical attention after a car accident in NYC. Prompt medical care can help to ensure that your injuries are diagnosed and limit the potential complications.

Can Whiplash Symptoms Be Delayed? 

Yes. In fact, many times, symptoms of whiplash don’t appear for weeks or months after an accident. That’s why it’s critical to make note of any unusual health issues and identify irregular pain in the months after a crash. Just because the symptoms don’t manifest right away doesn’t mean that you cannot be compensated for your injury. However, the length of time between the accident and the identification of your injury can make getting money more challenging. 

How Long Does Whiplash Last?

It depends on how severe the injury is. However, generally speaking, it takes about 17 weeks for the neck to stabilize and re-strengthen after a traumatic event. Symptoms can stick around for even longer. One study found that individuals who sustained a severe whiplash injury, meaning that they experienced a significant limitation in neck mobility, three-quarters were still symptomatic one year after their accident.

For those who sustain more moderate whiplash injuries, the symptoms can often disappear within a few weeks.

How is Whiplash Treated?

Doctors will diagnose whiplash by conducting a physical exam and, in some cases, relying on an imaging test such as an X-ray or MRI. Once you’ve been diagnosed with whiplash, the treatment protocol will ultimately depend on how severe your injury is.

However, commonly used courses of treatment include:

Rest

Application of heat or cold to the neck

Prescription or OTC medications, including pain killers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and muscle relaxants

Exercise and physical therapy

Restricting the neck’s range of motion using a foam collar

Acupuncture

Chiropractic care, and

Massage therapy.

A doctor may suggest some or a combination of several of these treatments.

What is My Whiplash Injury Worth After a NYC Car Accident?

As with all injuries, the value is tied to severity. The more serious the injury, the more it’s probably worth. That’s because a more severe injury is likely to cause more pain and be more of a disruption in your life. 

With a minor whiplash injury, you might not have to miss a day at work. If your injury is more severe, meaning that it limits your ability to move, you might have to stay home for a while and seek more intensive medical care.

Many factors will be relevant when assessing what your whiplash injury case is worth. At Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C., we’ll bring in professionals to help us establish a likely value. With expert input, we can identify which damages you may be entitled to receive and how much you should be paid to compensate for each.  

We’ll pursue any damages available under the law. Damages commonly awarded to whiplash victims in New York include money for:

Present and future medical expenses

Lost wages and income

Reduced earning capacity

Disability

Pain and suffering

Emotional distress and trauma

Loss of enjoyment of life

Property damage, and more.

We’ll work hard to hold negligent parties accountable and secure the compensation you deserve. All you have to do is give our NYC law offices a call to schedule a free case assessment today.

How Long Do I Have to File a Whiplash Injury Lawsuit?

First, it’s important to understand that New York has no-fault insurance rules. This means that, if your whiplash injury is the result of a car accident, you’ll have to seek benefits from your insurance provider first, regardless of fault. If the cost of your whiplash injury exceeds what your insurer will pay, you can then seek additional compensation from a negligent party and/or their insurance company.

If you find yourself in this situation, you’ll have a limited amount of time to act. For insurance claims, you’ll have to notify insurance companies as soon as you can after an accident. Then, you’ll have to file a formal claim for benefits. How long you’ll have to do that depends on the insurance company. They make the rules. Generally speaking, companies require you to submit a claim within a “reasonable” amount of time after an accident.

When you decide to file a lawsuit, your claim must be filed within three years of the date of your accident. However, the clock won’t begin to run until you’ve identified your injury. So, if your whiplash isn’t obvious until three months after your car accident, that’s when the statute of limitations will begin to run. 

You will lose the right to demand and receive compensation if you don’t file your claim on time. For that reason, it is always best to make sure that you entrust your case to a qualified NYC car accident lawyer. 

Call Our NYC Whiplash Injury Attorneys For Help Now

Whiplash might not be a catastrophic injury, but it can have catastrophic consequences that affect many aspects of your life. If someone else is responsible for your whiplash injury, our NYC personal injury attorneys will fight to hold them accountable. We represent clients in and around New York City, including the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Westchester.

Give our team a call today to schedule a free, no-obligation case assessment and learn more.

[rickhorrow]

15 to watch 111918

15 TO WATCH/5 SPORTS TECH/POWER OF SPORTS 5: RICK HORROW’S TOP SPORTS/BIZ/TECH/PHILANTHROPY ISSUES FOR THE WEEK OF NOVEMBER 19 with Jamie Swimmer & Jacob Aere Major League Baseball is sticking with Fox Sports. MLB signed a seven-year media rights deal with Fox worth a reported $5.1 billion over its lifetime, equating to $728.6 million per year. Fox is currently locked into an eight-year, $525 million per year deal that is set to run through 2021. According to SportsBusiness Journal, “The deal, which keeps MLB tied to Fox and FS1 through 2028, looks much like Fox’ current deal, in part, because that was all MLB could sell as its other media packages are not up.” The new the new , Fox is going all in on baseball, preparing to carry the World ri iewership numbers. Despite being removed from the NFL’s slate of game this season, Mexico remains in the NFL’s long term international plans. According to the Los Angeles Times and other sources, the International Series game between the Kansas City Chiefs . Estadio Azteca is one of the most iconic and historic stadiums in the Americas, having played host to countless mega sporting events, such as two Wo weekend of November, when Mexicans celebrate the Revolution's an sary." “In the next 20 years the Mexican economy is going to grow,” said NFL Executive VP of International Mark Waller. “So it’s important for us that we’re part of that long-term future.” While moving the Thanksgiving We l, doesn't even include a view of the court itself. The Warriors noted that fans who "purchase the pass will have access to the arena's bars and restaurants and can watch on the televisions in the club areas." And fans, who can each buy up to four of the new passes, still have a chance to receive one of the Warriors’ in-venue giveaways if they are one of the first 10,000 people into the arena. Sporting events have been cast as the new social clubs, and for the 44,000 fans stuck on the Warriors season-ticket wait list, this is an innovative alternative to bask in the aura of the most exciting team in basketball. A future Winter Olympics in Calgary seems unlikely after voters rejected a bid for the 2026 Games. According to the Calgary Herald, supporters of the city’s 2026 bid noted that another bid for the 2030 ir Scott Hutcheson. “You can't put a city through this every four years. My view would be let it go, accept the result, move on and come back with a bid maybe in seven years.” Funding for the mega event was always up in the air, even after the IOC pledged to help pick up a significant chunk colored “to raise awareness of Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces campaign.” The EPL will promote the cause during two weekend’s worth of matches beginning on November 30, “giving all 20 clubs the opportunity to celebrate their LGBT community and to make clear football is for everyone” with rainbow colored laces. Premier League matches will feature a "bespoke Rainbow Laces pitch flag, ball plinth, handshake board and substitutes board” from November 30-December 5. This push for awareness in the LGBT community has been echoed all across the globe in professional soccer. In June, the U.S. men’s and women’s and other international teams sported rainbow numbers on their jerseys during competitive and friendly matches as part of LGBT Pride Month. Leaked documents regarding a new “Super League” have taken the soccer world by storm. According to JohnWallStreet, plans for the newly-proposed league were revealed by German magazine Der Spiegel and indicated that seven of Europe’s biggest clubs (Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus, AC Milan, Manchester United, and Arsenal) ongoing leadership turmoil, this is an interesting development to watch indeed. Tennis has a new tournament in the ATP Cup. According to SportsBusiness Journal, the new competition will feature teams from 24 nations with buckets of ranking points and prize money. These new plans set men’s professional tennis on a “collision course” with the ITF’s planned 18-nation Davis Cup event being held in late November 2019 in Madrid. With the new ATP Cup, “the ATP is essentially replicating the same format six weeks later to start the 2020 season in Australia.” Many close to the sport speculate that the events will eventually merge or one will have to replace the other. The first ATP Cup is being planned for early January, 2020 in three Australian cities with $15 million to be awarded in prize money, “less than the roughly $20 million the Davis Cup said it will award next November.” While the money will be less, the ranking points will be worth a lot in this event, as “smaller prize money might be a worthwhile tradeoff.” The sport’s ranking male stars, already long in the tooth by tennis standards, will be a year older when the ATP Cup debuts, so expect this new global stage to be grabbed by many now-unknown throughout the 2019 season leading up to the Tour Championship. “Rather than 72 players making the Race to the CME Globe, 60 players will make it to the Race,” said LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan. “We'll still race all year…Once you're one of the 60 to get in, we throw the points out the door and anybody can win the final event. The winner's check will be $1.5 million, so it will be the largest winner's check in women's golf history. To think that the best players in the world won't be paying more attention to the CME Group Tour Championship next year would be wrong.” The Race upgrades mark the latest creative flourish in Whan’s expansive LPGA tenure, from expanding his tour’s global footprint to adding cutting-edge events like the Indy Women in Tech Presented by Group1001 tournament. The legalization of sports betting across the country is expected to ultimately change how we interact with sports venues. According to USA Today, Monumental Sports & Entertainment Chair and CEO Ted Leonsis expects sports venues to eventually become “casinos of a sort — open nearly around the clock to capture a coming mania for legalized sports betting.” Some expect new stadiums to be smaller than previously built ones as virtual reality becomes a more viable option for watching games. Instead of paying for a courtside seat, one would simply have to pay a much smaller fee for that same seat thanks to their VR headset. Leonsis sees sports franchises across the board increasing their franchise values as they begin to partner with technology companies for advanced sports betting. “Five years from now, it could be an Amazon is streaming and your subscription is part of Prime, and they have your credit card on file and you’re able to bet live through an Amazon,” said Leonsis. “And you would have never envisioned that something like that could happen.” As anyone who has viewed a basketball game from a VR-enabled courtside seat can attest, this technology is fast maturing, and it’s certainly conceivable that sports betting could become a regular – and lucrative – part of the experience. Chegg teams up with sports stars Julie Johnston Ertz of USA Women's Soccer and Zach Ertz of the Philadelphia Eagles. According to PR Newswire, Chegg will give $860.00 dollars for every first down and $1,086.00 dollars for every touchdown recorded by Zach for a contribution of up to $86,000.00 to the Ertz Family Foundation. The “86” is an ode to Zach's jersey in a campaign dollar amount. All proceeds will benefit the Ertz Family Foundation's education initiatives. The campaign started on the NFL regular season opening game and will run through February 10, 2019. To date, Zach has earned $41,550 from Chegg. Zach has been honored as an NFL Pro Bowl nominee in 2017 and was recently named the NFLPA Community MVP for Week 5 as a result of his work to change the lives of children in Haiti through the Foundation's scholarship program. Zach and his world champion wife Julie established the Ertz Family Foundation earlier this year. The dream philanthropy team continues to stay dedicated to their community and relentlessly promote education. The New York Yankees are money savvy, but they really just want to win above anything else. According to SportsBusiness Journal, Yankees Managing General Partner Hal Steinbrenner noted that staying under the luxury tax line of $206 million is “on his mind,” but it is not “as much of an ardent goal this season.” Having fallen to their bitter rivals, the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees’ front office is more motivated than ever to win this coming year. “We’re going to keep adding pieces until we’re sure we are where we need to be,” he said. The Red Sox having been taking flack from many around the league for buying their way to a championship, having spent $234 million to build this season’s championship team. “It’s only one team,” said Steinbrenner. “It comes down to the player development system. And I think anything’s possible with payrolls that aren’t $250 million to $300 million.” Reportedly front and center in the Yankees’ sites: free agent short stop Manny Machado, acquired by the Dodgers from the Orioles in July for five prospects and a $6.3 million one-year contract. The Tampa Bay Rays are running out of time to find a viable stadium option for the long term. The team currently plays at Tropicana Field and has been searching for a viable new home for years now. According to the Tampa Bay Times, less than two months remain "until the window closes on a three-year agreement” between the Rays and the city of St. Petersburg for the team to explore ballpark options in Tampa. The team has proposed a new home in Ybor City, though plans have not yet been revealed publicly regarding funding for the $900 million development. With local elections “out of the way, negotiations between the team and city and county officials on a ballpark financing plan are expected to kick into high gear.” A hard deadline of December 31 is in place to come to a consensus on the Ray’s new stadium plans, and it seems unclear whether an agreement will be struck before then. Major League Baseball plans a summer league for high schoolers. MLB is "planning a summer league for elite high school players that it hopes will eat into the pay-for-play market that exists today," according to sources. This would mark MLB's "boldest effort yet to reclaim a youth apparatus that has been outsourced to third-party profiteers." The Prospect Development Pipeline League, announced by MLB last week, would "invite 80 of the best rising seniors -- most of whom will be drafted in 2020 -- and offer the best of the group a chance to play at a high school game during All-Star week in addition to a high school home run derby." The league "could grow in size and scope and perhaps challenge the current system." MLB is clearly taking a page from the NBA’s playbook, which includes opportunities for high schoolers within its ever-evolving G League farm system. Next year, G League Select Contracts, which will include robust programmatic opportunities for development, will be available for elite basketball players who are at least 18 years old and will pay $125,000 for the five-month season. The Pac-12 announced that Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Boulder will meet in 2019 in the fifth edition of the Pac-12 China Game presented by Alibaba Group. Longtime Pac-12 partner Federation of University Sports of China will serve as the co-host for the basketball game. The matchup between the Sun Devils and Buffaloes is tentatively scheduled for November 9, 2019 for national broadcast in both the U.S. and China. It will be the "first time the game has featured two programs from the Pac-12, though the contest will be considered a nonconference game.” The game also will mark the "first time a CU program from any sport will compete in Asia," according to BuffZone.com. Yale beat Cal last Saturday 76-59 in the 2018 Pac-12 China Game, marking the “first time a Pac-12 team has fallen in its opening China Game” according to the Yale Daily News. The game was played in “front of 4,000 Chinese fans” at Baoshan Sports Center in Shanghai and a national tv audience. This annual matchup remains the only regular-season game played by a U.S. sports league, pro or collegiate, in China. Just call it hoops diplomacy. WWE is reporting that WrestleMania 34 generated $175 million in economic impact for the city of New Orleans region this past April. According to a study conducted by the Enigma Research Corporation, this marks the seventh consecutive year that WrestleMania generated more than $100 million in economic impact for its host region. A record crowd of 78,133 fans from all 50 states and 67 countries attended WWE’s pop-culture extravaganza this past April, making it the highest-grossing entertainment event in the history of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. WrestleMania’s financial windfall is just the latest in a string of top-dollar mega events bringing major revenue to the Crescent City, most recently the 2017 NBA All-Star Game, which brought an estimated $44.9 million in spending to the state of Louisiana and Super Bowl LVIII in 2013, which created $480 million in economic impact. Kudos to stadium management leader SMG and their New Orleans-based vice president of stadiums Doug Thornton for key contributions to all three events. Tech Top Five The Game Awards will livestream across a record-setting 40 global networks, including expanded distribution in China. According to Cynopsis Sports, the PlayStation 4, Xbox Live, IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, MLG, Caffeine.tv, and others. With esports a bubbling industry, it is only fitting that the Oscar-like event celebrates the recent successes of top video games while looking toward the future by teasing upcoming gaming trailers for audiences. Like video games themselves, The Game Awards allow for audience participation, with 10% of the final vote driven by the public, further cementing esports’ interactive nature. The NBPA has inked a deal to bring its stars closer to the esports world. The NBPA signed a deal with ReadyUp, an app that helps esports fans track and watch their favorite online gamers. Under the deal announced at SportsBusiness Journal’s Esports Rising, the league’s stars will now have an opportunity to profit from the online video-game leagues they take part in, says Payne Brown, president of the NBPA’s marketing arm. According to Bloomberg, these esports leagues contain franchisees, salary caps, and multimillion dollar TV deals with networks such as follows a previous agreement between the two companies, the new agreement adds coverage of the Champions League and Europa League. WSC Sports currently operates across 10 different sports in five continents and also works with properties such as the NBA, MLS, PGA, FIBA, United Soccer League, World Surfing League, Turner Sports, Cricket Australia, and others. The drive for shorter clips, due to shorter attention spans, may be WSC’s key to sports business success as game highlights tend to be what people will spend the most time consuming. Tim Tebow is teaming up with LeBron James to host “Million Dollar Mile.” According to The Washington Post, “Million Dollar Mile” is a new TV competition series co-created by James’s production company, SpringHill Entertainment. Tebow finds himself at the helm of another high profile offseason job as he already serves as a college football analyst for ESPN. CBS will air the 10-episode series and claimed in an August news release that the show involves “shutting down the streets of a major city” to set up a course with competitors at one end and $1 million at the other. The catch is that it’s supposedly the most challenging course ever designed, with a group of elite athletes attempting to stop the contestants from winning the money at all costs. James’ company has also produced Showtime’s “Shut Up and Dribble,” HBO’s “Student-Athlete,” Starz’s “Warriors of Liberty City,” NBC’s “The Wall,” and Facebook’s “Do or Dare.” “Million Dollar Mile” will feature ESPN reporter Maria Taylor and Los Angeles Chargers play-by-play announcer Matt “Money” Smith with a release date yet to be announced. LeBron pushes the limits of what’s possible on and off the court and has proven that he can be a very successful field marshal with a camera as well as a basketball. MLB coupled its massive Fox Sports deal with a $300 million streaming deal with DAZN. On top of a deal that will see Fox Sports pay $728 million for its rights annually, MLB has secured a three-year streaming deal with over-the-top streaming service DAZN which will not feature rights to any live games, but will include live cut-ins. This deal marks the first domestic major league sports property for DAZN in the U.S. and will likely be accompanied by a weeknight show similar to the NFL’s popular “RedZone.” The new MLB agreement will also feature an expanded streaming, social media, and highlights strategy between the partners. While it’s not shocking to see Fox continue its MLB relationship, DAZN keeps growing its OTT empire by breaking into a major U.S. sports market – expect NHL, NFL, or even NBA deals from the OTT company in the near future. Power of Sports Five For the fourth year in a row, this Black Friday, REI will close all 153 stores, process no online payments, and pay more than 12,000 employees to #OptOutside with friends and family. Since 2015, 15 million people and more than 700 organizations have joined the #OptOutside movement — REI’s effort to inspire people to do something other than consume. This year, REI is also pledging $1 million toward the launch of a new center of academic excellence at the University of Washington called Nature for Health that will study the link between human health and time spent outdoors. The new center of academic excellence within the university’s EarthLab will broaden and deepen its examination of how time outside impacts our health. It will build on existing bodies of work and explore new ideas — such as whether a dose of nature can be prescribed alongside traditional medicine to tackle issues such as anxiety and depression. With the annual move, REI joins other progressive companies such as sports science leader Embody and active wear giant Lululemon in thinking outside the box when it comes to sports and recreational health. Purdue superfan Tyler Trent gets a bobblehead to help the fight against cancer. According to ESPN, the former Purdue student is fighting a rare form of bone cancer. He became such a national sensation during the Boilermakers' victory over Ohio State last month that there was a significant rise in donations supporting cancer research. Now, the 20-year-old will be honored with his very own bobblehead to be sold by the Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee. The trinkets will sell on the HOF website for $30 with the Tyler Trent Cancer Research Endowment at Purdue to receive $2 from the proceeds of each bobblehead sold, while The V Foundation for Cancer Research will receive $3 apiece. Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum founder Phil Sklar said that Trent’s bobblehead is comparable to many other successful creations like Sister Jean, in which people felt a strong connection to the person and their message. Donations to Tyler's fund, thanks in part to a dollar-for-dollar match with the Walther Cancer Center in Indianapolis, have topped $100,000. To make a personal battle against cancer a fight for the bigger cure is something noble of Trent – to highlight his efforts by representing him donning his school’s colors in bobblehead form is something lasting by the Hall of Fame. The RESPONSIBALL Forum proposes a call to action for refugees’ inclusion in sport. The event was held in in Lausanne, Switzerland to promote the use of athletics to support refugees. According to sportanddev.org, speakers and attendees came from a variety of backgrounds and had the chance to hear stories, share experiences, and learn how to more effectively run programs. Among the panelists were refugees, sports federations, NGOs, and governments. The event ended with a call to action that aims to put sports higher up the agenda as a tool to work with refugees while encouraging more coordination between different athletic and refugee organizations. Additionally, the panels sought to have research provided to back up the claims that sport helps refugees acclimate to their new countries. Sports and international politics are inevitably entwined, and providing more access to athletics for refugees may help countries also grow a stronger fan base and business platform for their professional sports teams. In the wake of Paul Allen’s passing, his foundation will reap the profits of the Seattle Seahawks’ sale. According to SportsPro, proceeds from the future Seahawks sale are set to be put towards the Paul G. Allen Foundation. This was a move that Allen himself had planned before he passed away in October. Although Jody Allen, sister of Paul, has assumed control of Allen’s estate, it is assumed that the team will now be sold to a wealthy individual or investor group. Based upon estimates, the sale will likely set records for a North American sports franchise, with Forbes suggesting a potential sale of $2.6 billion. Paul Allen also owned the NBA Portland Trail Blazers and was a part owner of the MLS Sounders FC, which are also likely to be sold later this year for roughly $1.3 billion and $60 million respectively. Although he was an early tech mogul, Allen left his mark in the sports world by helping to build revered northwestern teams in multiple pro sports leagues. Colorado’s NBA and NHL teams come out for Special Olympics and educational charities. According to Westword, players from the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche, in addition to members of the Colorado Rapids soccer team and the Colorado Mammoth box lacrosse squad attended the charity fundraiser at their home arena, the Pepsi Center. The Mile High Dreams Gala brought out sports fans, media personalities, and Denver's high society for a night where proceeds went toward Kroenke Sports Charities. The event raised close to $100,000 for programs such as the Special Olympics of Colorado and the Denver Public Schools Foundation according to Deb Dowling, Kroenke Sports Charities executive director. In its tenth year, the charity gala brought out both rookie and veteran players including Michael Porter Jr. and Gary Harris of the Nuggets. This cross-sport charity gala highlights how athletes across multiple leagues can come together to support important charitable causes in the communities in which they play.                                                                                                              

[profoundgardenertree-blog]

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

"Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://saleinsurancequotes.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

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They say that now, insurance companies can no longer deny insurance to people with pre -existing conditions. So what was HIPAA passed in 1996 for? This law states that insurance companies CAN NOT deny people with pre -existing conditions. The only change I see is it gets rid of the 12 month exclusion period. I had two aunts with lupus, both lived in California and had insurance, until they moved to Texas. If they could have kept their insurance, they would have, but for some odd reason liberals are against insurance across state lines. They had no problem finding insurance, they just had to be out of pocket for 12 months. HIPAA also states that if you can go six months without any medical visits, advice/procedures, insurance companies are not allowed to look further than that and must not apply the exclusion period. So did the Affordable Care Act really stop insurance companies from denying coverage for pre existing conditions, or was it ALREADY a law? http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq_consumer_hipaa.html""

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I am almost 24 and I want to get a new car but I'm not sure how much I can afford a month because I'm not sure how much full coverage insurance would be. I was recently in an accident so I have 2 points on my license and never paid full coverage so I have no idea around how much it would be.

Would insurance be high on a 1999 pontiac firebird ws6 v8?

I am 19 years old and am currently paying about $130.00 a month for insurance. I am looking in to buying the car listed above, how much more would I be paying on insurance? I do believe it is considered a sport, but its a 1999. Maybe age makes a difference? I am curently driving a truck.""

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I had a fire claim in the last 6 months ($30,000 claim), and I am not happy with my current insurance company. It has taken them 6 months to pay out. I have been trying to get a quote from different insurance companies and they all say that they cannot give me a quote because I had a significant claim the last 5 years. Does anyone know of an insurance company that doesn't have this policy?""

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I live in Tennessee and moving down to Florida in early August and in Tennessee at age 16 you can get a license called Intermediate Restricted Driver License which just has more restrictions then a 17 year old and less restrictions then a 15 year old/permit. I'm not sure if Florida has these type of licenses but at the age of 16 with a Tennessee Intermediate Restricted License, to get a Florida license, must you show proof of insurance before you get your Florida license? The reason why i'm asking this is because obviously in Tennessee you do not need proof of insurance to get a Driver License. Thanks Guys!""

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Okay, this is the deal, I have full coverage car insurance. This means that the insurance will cover me, if I have an accident that is my fault or if someone else hits me & it's not my fault. I also have insurance that covers me if someone breaks into my car & steals any kind of important items in my car. The Question... I sometimes let other people drive my car, to run errands for me (like driving my car home, cause I'm too sleepy to drive or I'm super busy & need an item from the store & I hand my keys to a licensed driver). I talked to my insurance company & was told they do not have coverage that will cover other drivers unless they are listed under my coverage. The problem - I don't want to list everybody in my family or all my friends. Isn't there insurance coverage that will cover anybody driving my vihecle as long as they are older than 25 & has a valid license? If so, what's the name of this type coverage - I nd to know the name b4 I call other companys. thanks""

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Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

How much would full coverage insurance cost on a 1965 Silver Cloud 3 Rolls-Royce?

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""If you have your learner's permit, do you need car insurance?""

If you have your learner's permit, do you need car insurance?""

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If you drive with no license or insurance are you automatically at fault?

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Health insurance???

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Who gives the cheapest car insurance for a nissan skyline import?

""How much is the fine when a cop pull you over and dont have licence,insurance and tags!?

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Car insurance is too much.. must bring down $$ any ideas?

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How much would insurance be on a Mustang GT for a 16 year old driver?

Please give me a price range. Not any comments like a lot or to much. Please give me a price range. Many thanks.

""For my situation, what is the best way to minimize my car insurance?

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How much would insuring my car for just one day cost?

How much would it normally cost? it's a bmw 530i for just one day plz let me know :)

When i turn 21 can i change my car insurance details for cheaper car insurance?

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Hey guys im only 14 but out of curiosity I would love to know about how much a month insurance would be part time on a motorcycle for a 16 year old or 18 year old. Im looking at a yamaha r6. So give me some guesses or if you know for sure thats even better. Thanks

Can I get anything from the insurance company of the guy who totaled my car?

My car was totaled while parked. My insurance will pay blue book value for my vehicle, which is less than what I owe and I don't have gap insurance. Now I am jobless and w/o a car, but needing one ASAP to go to school. Can I get anything from the insurance company of the guy who totaled my car?""

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

How to get a car which is inbound because car was without insurance?

There is an awareness issue of , we didnt have car insurance . but yesterday I got to know that its illegal to drive a car without insurance. The understanding was that it would be dangerous but illegal was new thing. From yesterday we are trying to get insurance but they are saying that it is not possible to get insurance for inbound car. We can get insurance after release of the car but now we are stucked .Because police is not releasing car without insurance. We don't know anybody here so facing little problem.""

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We are about to begin the process of making a baby and have private insurance threw Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. The thing is we didnt sign up for Maturnity care at the begining. We can add it, but will it cover the pregnancy if I didnt get it from the beginning of the policy? I cant seem to find that qustion on thier site so thats why I am asking here. Thanks for all who can be of some help.""

Car insurance question?

I recently got into a car accident that was my fault. The total damages is around 2000 dollars. the owner of the car has contacted me and asked if we could resolve it with out involving the insurance Company. What would be better to do? i have had one other accident that was not my fault. how much will my car insurance go up and for how long?

Where can i find free health insurance?

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Motorbike insurance?

barclays motorbike insurance

Health insurance in USA?

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Can I borrow money from my life insurance policy?

I have had a life insurance policy since 2002. It is only for $50,000.00. I have always paid and never been late. I am now in a bind and need this money to start up a business. Being that I have had this policy for now a little over 8 years, can I borrow the full amount?""

How much will my car insurance go up if I make a claim?

I crashed into someone and my bonnet is crumpled up, it will only cost 100 to repair, so is it worth getting insurance involved? How much will my insurance go up if I do make a claim? (The other person involved is my neighbour and their car wasn't damaged so they are not bothered either way.) My car insurance is currently 1000 per year""

I want to take a trip to europe how much do motorcycles cost there and how much is insurance?

Im thinking of going to the EU, as kind of like a backpacking trip, but on a motorcycle! I was wondering how things work in regards to prices of Bikes there, and insurance that covers anywhere I might plan to go! I need some help making this idea a reality! Oh I'm 18 and i have both my drivers licence and motorcycles licence, I reside in BC, Canada. Thanks!""

What car would be the cheapest and most reliable?

Im a 17 year old guy. My parents are giving me $2000 for a down payment on my first car. We're going to a used car lot this weekend. They have 2 cars I want and 1 car my dad thinks I should get. The ones I want are an older 2 Door Tahoe, and a Chevy S10. The one my dad thinks I should get is a Honda civic. He says the Civic would have the cheapest insurance. But I play guitar, so it would be hard to lug around a big amp, guitar case, and pedal board. I want the Tahoe the most but I think its gonna be too much. What do you think?""

How soon does actors get their health insurance?

How soon does production company offer health insurance for their workers? And, what other insurance does the production company offer their workers; and, how soon?""

Motorcycle insurance... Tell me everything.?

What can you tell me about cycle insurance as far as coverages I should get and dont need, and what I need and who do you think is the best company to get it from.. Me; 25, sportbike""

Will my insurance go up after receiving3 points on my license?

I got careless driving and the cop told me it would be 3 points on my license. I took traffic school to remove previous points 6 months ago so I cannot do that. Will these 3 points raise my insurance rate? Also, I was pulled over by an unmarked detective, and he called in a motor cop to write the ticket. Would it be worth taking to court, and if I take it to court, what are the benefits vs. the losses I can face?""

How much will my insurance go up after a fender bender?

Im 16 years old and i have progressive, this morning i hit a car, there was only a couple scratches on the other car as i didn't hit it hard, and no damage to my car. The police werent called we just exchanged info, so how much will my insurance go up for this accident. if you can even call it that.""

Short term car insurance?

want a scooby on the side for a bit of fun, can i get some sort of insurance for say..... weekends or the odd day here and there.""

Do anyone know where i can get cheaper car insurance?

Im with Tesco and am due to renew my insurance next month but what im paying at the moment is sky high. Ive been on the road 2 years now, I have a reno clio.""

What medical insurance is cheap in California? ?

Is there medicaid n Cali ? Or just Oklahoma

How much would my insurance on average be for a 2007 V6 mustang with allstate?

Im calling tomorrow to get a quote but, i was wondering if anybody had an idea. Its a V6 so that makes a huge difference since its not a V8 GT. Im just unsure how much allstate wants for a V6 mustang. if anybody has a price range they could give me it would be greatly appreciated. thank you!!""

How much would the insurance cost for a 2005 Mazda rx8?

I'm 17, I live in Georgia, & I'm about to obtain my license. I've had my permit for almost a year now, & I am deciding on getting an rx8 for Christmas, but I don't know if the insurance will be high or not. Could anyone possibly tell me? btw, we are on Allstate.""

Can an employer deny health insurance for a spouse if they have insurance in california?

i have insurance and he is on mine, and he has insurance but it is too expensive for both of us. is there a particular law that says my employer cannot force me to use his or force him off mine?""

Do I have to have insurance to get my car put in my name?

I have been living away from home so my parents want to put my car in my name. My mother keeps telling me that I must have insurance in my name in order to change it. Oh and I live in Alabama if that helps with anything. She just informed me this past week and all my monthly bills are due so I won't exactly have the money to do so.. get my drift? Any answers will be helpful!!!! Thanks!

Suggestions on how to lower my car insurance?

I drive a 1.8 TurboDiesel Ford Escort from 1995, worth about 500-750. I'm looking to renew my car insurance and the best quote I can get from price comparison sites and Direct Line is over 650! This is at the age now of 27 having driven for 3 years without tickets, accidents or claims. On my 1st year I paid under 400 for insurance. I know insurance is going up but this is excessive - anyone have suggestions on ways to knock this down other than ringing them all up, or other insurers not on the comparison sites?""

How long can a Insurance company in the state of Tennessee look back on your driving record?

I had a wreck two years ago this October, I was wondering how long an insurance company can look back on my record? Its been two years since I have had any wrecks or tickets but my rates are still high, I was thinking if I switch companies and didnt tell them about the wreck I would have a clean record?""

Can anyone give me an estimate on how much insurance would be on this car for an 18 year old?

http://www.arnoldclark.com/detail.html?ac_reg=cc_z7zzceuy0c1uz99c&$ac_branch=&$ac_min=&$ac_variant=&$ac_trans=&$ac_type=&$ac_model=Z4&$ac_body=Convertible&$ac_doors=&$ac_max=&$ac_year=&$ac_cc=&$ac_fuel=&$ac_color=&$ac_miles=&$get_results=View%201%20Cars&$ac_make=BMW&$ac_sr=0&$ac_pp=10 I'm 18, and am considering buying this car. I'm not naive, I am aware the insurance will be very high as I'm a teenager and it's a sports car, but is there anyone here who works in the car insurance industry who can give me an estimate on how much insurance would cost me a year?""

Looking for health insurance for self employed person with hepatitus c?

I am self employed and have Hepatitus C, I am looking for health insurance""

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

What is the cheapest insurance company?

Ok so I'm 16 years I have an 08 Kawasaki ninja 250 and I live in rural California what should I expect to pay for liability only

Whats the best car to get to make your insurance cheap as possible?

I turn 17 next month and start my job this month, so i'll have money spare, so i'm thinking of getting a car, but i know insurance can be really expensive, so i was wondering what car is best to keep the cost of insurance down? Thanks for answers :)""

Can my car insurance company drop me for having not at fault accidents?

I had Go Auto insurance on my 2 cars. Well over the courseof about 1-1 1/2 years (a year to a year and a half). I had about 3 wrecks. All not my fault. The other drivers were 100% at fault. After the third wreck, which was not to long ago. My insurance company (Go Auto) sent me a letter saying they weren't gonna let me renew my insurance with them because i was considered poor risk . Can they do this or should i contact insurance commissioner. No rude comments.""

What's the cheapest Insurance company?

I'm sixteen, will be seventeen in June. I just got a job and I need to get insurance so I can get a car. My parent's insurance will be really expensive plus to put the car on there it will be even extra. Can anyone tell me what the cheapest car insurance place would be for me with full coverage? Thank you (: oh and my car will be a 2000 saturn.""

Is it possible for someone to sponsor your car insurance?

I heard you could find somebody to sponsor your car insurance and the rate will go down if the person has good credit. Is that true? and what company has lowest insurance rate for 2 way?

How much does auto insurance cost for a 16 year old male with Erie?

I just got my license and now I want to get a car but my dad wont pay for insurance, I was wondering what the possible prices might be. I would like a Jeep Wrangler or a VW ...show more""

Question about multiple car insurance policies?

I'm 17 and currently have my learner's permit. My parents have separate insurance policies (My Dad has Geico for his 2007 Honda Accord, my Mom has Metlife for her 2003 Dodge Grand Caravan). My Dad recently added me to his Geico policy as having a learner's permit. But my question is this - I know that I will be able to drive my Dad's car since I'm on his policy, but realistically, I would want to be able to drive both cars (and I would likely be using the Caravan more often anyway). Once I get my license, do I have to be listed on both insurance policies to drive both cars? If I wasn't and got in an accident with the Dodge, would I be covered?""

Proof of insurance California?

I recently had my car fixed and for some stupid reason I pulled all my documentation out of the car. Well, I got pulled over one day and was cited for not having my proof of insurance. (Stupid, I know.) The cop was really nice and said I just needed to go down to the court and show them that I was covered during the period I was pulled over. He said the fine would be at most 10 bucks. Today I get my notice of bail and it says that if I show proof of insurance, I can get the bail reduced to 756 dollars! Am I reading this right? Thanks""

What would insurance roughly cost for a 17 year old as a second driver to some one who has no tickets/fines?

im looking to buy a 1994 nissan skyline gts-t for my 1st car and am wondering roughly it would cost im also looking a 1992 dodge stealth

Insurance for new baby/family?

I'm newly pregnant - 6weeks. The boyfriend - of 5 yrs - & I were talking yesterday at my prenatal appt & he brought up insurance. The baby's due in early july 2009. He has Blue Cross Blue Shield. I have Aetna. I know that, over here in Virginia, Medicaid is completely free & they will automatically give a pregnant woman insurance thru them. I'm not sure where to go w/ insurance as far as our first baby goes. Do we keep our separate insurances & just add each other & the baby? Do we drop both & get Medicaid? Well, that would only cover me & the baby, I believe. What to do? THANKS!""

My cars milage is unknown does this affect me getting insurance on this vehicle?

current odometer reads 106,000 miles . but car has more miles because odemeter was once broke before being fixe i bout a used 94 accord and the odometer currently works but previous owner bought the car with broken odometer. and on( title )/ pink slip it marks odometer reading is not the actual milage..... will this affect me getting insurance on this car.. i dont want them charging me a lot of money for trying to fraud them on the milage will they even ask milage will i be in big trouble if i put the current odometer reading but the company finds out it has more? do i need to go back to dmv and get some paperwork? do i need to point out that the pink slip states milage is unknown? and make sure insurance company documents this befor signing me""

Temporary Car Insurance?

Ive been talking to brokers, and car insurance agents. Im moving from NY to NC, i have no car insurance, and i dont want to pay for Ny insurance fully, because when i move to NC i plan on getting NC insurance. I want temporary insurance, and one agent told me about in transit insurance? ive been looking up things all day and no success. can someone give me advice on what i should do if i only need ny car insurance to just drive down to NC???? thank you!""

Cheap Car insurance...............?

im 19 living in england just held my license for a week now. im being quoted 4 and half grand insurance on a 1.4 civic. that is bullshit. does anybody know a cheap insurance legit one? i need to start driving ASAP.

Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old in california?

hey im 17 years old, and got the money together for my first bike. i went down to the dealership and was about to buy the bike when i found out insurance cost like 4k for full coverage. i want full coverage but dont wanna pay through the nose for it. i have not owned a bike before and i really want one, but im not sure if i can aford to. so my question is does anyone know what i should do to resolve my problem? preferably recomendations of good insurance comannys. thanks so much""

What is the difference between non-owner car insurance and a bond?

What is the difference between non-owner car insurance and a bond?

Insurance or out-of-pocket?

The bumber and trunk of my new 2006 Honda Civic was hit by someone unknown when my car was parked in a lot. The damage is a sizeable dent. How much will it cost for a repair in the dealership? Is it better to pay it myself or let the insurance do it (worry about increasing insurance rate). Any other ideas will help? Thanks

How much would my insurance be?

I'm 16 I will be 17 in about 9months. I will be buying a 2002 Nissan Maxima and I was wondering how much would I pay monthly/yearly on insurance. -I'm 16 -Grades aren't the best by they're passing. -I have no driving history. -I have a minor charge on my record that will go away when I'm 18. I know you can't give me a exact answer but a close one would help. Oh and if there's any way I can lower the cost that would help a lot. And is $4,200 to much to pay for my car? Thanks in advance :)""

How will my insurance premiums be affected?

I got into a minor fender bender. No scratch on either car but the person I hit (I rear-ended them) is claiming that I caused their airbag light to go on. Now they are going through the insurance process and it is not known yet whether they will claim against their own insurance company or go through mine. How do you think my insurance premium will be affected by this? Thanks for your help.

Transferring van insurance to car?

can u transfer van insurance to a car in republic of ireland

Motorbike insurance confusion?

I'm looking to get a new motorbike in January and am looking at quotes online. Where it says where is the bike kept overnight I have put: on a public road. Then where it says Address where bike is kept overnight I have put my home address. However I want to take it too uni and that's obviously a different address, but it won't let you have two. I have put on the form that my current address is my home rather than uni. Do I need to tell them that it's going to be at uni with or not because it'll be at both places for extended periods of time? It's also 400 more expensive to put address as uni - though cost isn't the problem just confused. thanks. Sorry if it was confusing, if you can't understand then I'll try and make it clearer.""

Whats the best California insurance ?

I want full coverage what's the best company

Old car insurance help?

just bought a new car and part exchanged my old one but the old one still had some months of insurance, can i get my money back for the un-used months? this ill help fund the new car's insurance""

My car insurance company has asked me for my proof of no claims?

But i either can't find it or it was never issued to me from my last insurer. what do i do? now my policy has been cancelled and need to set up some temporary cover. I have 4/5 years no claims.

Does any one know a really cheap car insurer for young drivers?

i need insurance quick. does any1 know areally cheap insurer?

Car accident involving two parties with same insurance company?

Hi there, My dad was involved in a car accident where the other party was at fault in WA state. Both parties have same insurance company. The Insurance company deemed the car as a total loss and sent a check of $4000. Meanwhile my dad had to go to a doctor because his neck is super stiff. Did anyone have similar experiences? $4000 isn't enough for a new car, and they can't afford car payments at this time (my mom has was just laid of), should we get a lawyer to contact the insurance company to demand higher compensation? Thanks!""

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

Tiff Missouri Cheap car insurance quotes zip 63674

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/auto-insurance-question-jose-finley/"

[mikemortgage]

US-China tariffs: What’s behind them, who stands to be hurt?

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has boldly declared that trade wars are easy to win. He’s about to find out.

The Trump administration on Friday was scheduled to start imposing tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese imports. And China has promised to promptly strike back with tariffs on an equal amount of U.S. exports.

And just like that, a high-risk trade war between the world’s two biggest economies begins — one that could quickly escalate.

“I see us running into a full collision course in a few days,” said Ashley Craig, a trade lawyer at Venable LLP. “It seems as if both sides are fairly dug in.”

Here’s a look at what’s happening and its likely impact.

——

WHAT IS THE U.S. DOING?

The White House last month announced plans to slap 25 per cent tariffs on roughly 1,100 goods imported from China, worth $50 billion a year. It had originally proposed the tariffs in April, starting with 1,333 Chinese products. After receiving public feedback, the administration cut 515 imports from the blacklist and added 284 others.

Starting Friday, the U.S. is taxing 818 Chinese products, worth $34 billion a year, from the original list. It won’t target the 284 additions, worth $16 billion, until it gathers further public comments.

——

HOW IS CHINA RESPONDING?

China has warned that it won’t yield to Trump’s pressure. Once the U.S. starts taxing Chinese imports Friday, Beijing has said it will impose 25 per cent tariffs on 545 U.S. products worth $34 billion a year — from soybeans and lobsters to sport-utility vehicles and whiskey. China is considering a follow-up tariff on an additional 114 U.S. goods, worth $16 billion a year.

Beijing’s target list of U.S. goods to penalize is heavy on agriculture. That’s hardly a coincidence. Its tariffs are meant to deliver pain to American farmers, who overwhelmingly backed Trump in the 2016 election and whose interests are represented by powerful lobbyists and members of Congress.

In the meantime, Trump has told his U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, to identify an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods for 10 per cent tariffs. These penalties would take effect, Trump has said, if Beijing fails to reform its trade practices and proceeds with retaliatory tariffs.

The stakes could rise further yet: Trump has threatened tariffs on still another $200 billion in Chinese products if Beijing continues to retaliate.

——

WHAT’S BEHIND THE U.S.-CHINA RIFT?

The Trump administration has accused China of using predatory tactics in a lawless drive to overtake America’s technological supremacy. U.S. officials point to Beijing’s long-range development plan, “Made in China 2025,” which calls for creating powerful Chinese entities in such areas as information technology, robotics, aerospace equipment, electric vehicles and biopharmaceuticals.

Foreign business groups argue that “Made in China 2025” is unfairly forcing them to the sidelines in those industries. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative concluded after an investigation that China’s tactics range from requiring U.S. and other foreign companies to hand over technology in return for access to the vast Chinese market to outright cyber-theft. The U.S. also asserts that Beijing uses state money to buy American technology at prices unaffordable for private companies.

In May, the White House had said it would announce curbs on Chinese investment in U.S. technology by June 30 and impose those restrictions shortly thereafter. But it has dropped that plan.

——

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INVESTMENT RESTRICTIONS?

The administration settled on a less draconian plan: It would back an effort in Congress to strengthen reviews of foreign investment under the existing Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. This committee, led by the Treasury secretary, considers whether a foreign investment poses a risk to America’s national security. These reviews apply to all countries — not just China — and are conducted on a case-by-case basis.

The House has approved a bill to strengthen the CFIUS law, and the bill will likely be considered by a House-Senate conference committee for a Senate-approved defence measure.

——

WHAT’S THE LIKELY IMPACT FROM A U.S.-CHINA TRADE WAR?

The initial fusillade of tariffs will likely do little damage to the United States, China or the global economy. But if they escalate, the pain will deepen and spread.

Economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch have warned that a full-fledged trade war, especially one that lasts more than a year, would slow the U.S. economy. By disrupting supply chains, eroding business confidence and heightening uncertainty, a trade war, they say, could “push the economy toward full-blown recession” and jeopardize America’s economic expansion — the second-longest on record.

Many individual businesses could soon endure hardship, too. Consider American soybean farmers, who send about 60 per cent of their exports to China. Their shipments will now be subject to a 25 per cent tariff, which will instantly make their crops far costlier in China.

What’s more, the U.S. tariffs on imported Chinese products could end up hurting American manufacturers. The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculates that 85 per cent of the Chinese products to be hit by the initial Trump tariffs are machinery and components used in finished goods made in the United States. A result is that U.S. manufacturers will have to pay more for parts and equipment, thereby putting them at a competitive disadvantage to foreign rivals.

——

ISN’T THE U.S. ALSO SPARRING WITH OTHER TRADING PARTNERS?

Yes. Trump is battling in just about every direction. He has slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum — action that has drawn retaliatory tariffs from U.S. allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union. The president is also threatening to impose tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts on the grounds that they pose a threat to America’s national security.

And he is pressuring Canada and Mexico to agree to rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement to shift more auto production to the United States and encourage companies to move investment from Mexico to the United States.

By brawling with America’s friends, critics say, Trump has squandered an opportunity to build a united front against China. After all, Europe, Japan and other rich countries have the same complaints about Chinese trade practices that America does.

——

IS THERE ANY REASON TO EXPECT A RESOLUTION?

Maybe. For a time, it looked as though peace might be at hand. In May, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared the trade war “on hold.” The Trump administration suspended its tariffs after Beijing agreed to increase its purchases of U.S. goods, especially in agriculture and energy. The idea was that China’s additional purchases would shrink its trade surplus with the United States. Yet the cease-fire was short-lived. Critics dismissed Beijing’s commitments as vague, and Trump decided to proceed with the tariffs after all.

The top White House economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, has said the two countries are “in communication” — although there’s been no word of any formal negotiations. Trump himself told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” that “China wants to make a deal, and so do I, but it’s got to be a fair deal for this country.”

——–

HAVE THERE BEEN TRADE WARS BEFORE?

You’d have to go back to the 1930s to find anything close to the hostility between the U.S. and its top trading partners right now. During the Great Depression, many countries, including the United States, closed their markets to imports. A plunge in global trade likely worsened the Depression.

Many less intense trade conflicts have followed. President Ronald Reagan slapped tariffs on $300 million worth of Japanese imports in a dispute over the semiconductor industry and strong-armed Tokyo into accepting limits on car shipments to the United States.

In 2002, President George W. Bush imposed tariffs on Chinese steel. The move allowed U.S. steel producers to increase prices, raising costs for companies that buy steel and pressuring them to cut back elsewhere. But the tariffs are thought to have cost significant U.S. job losses.

In 2009, the Obama administration imposed tariffs on Chinese tires, charging that a surge in imports was hurting the U.S. tire industry. Beijing counterpunched. It imposed a tax of up to 105 per cent on U.S. chicken feet — a throwaway item in the U.S. that’s considered a delicacy in China. The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the tariffs probably saved 1,200 American tire jobs. But consumers paid over $900,000 in higher tire prices for each job saved.

——–

Follow Paul Wiseman on Twitter at https://twitter.com/PaulWisemanAP

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2zaoWQh via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[joshuamshea84]

How to Buy the Best Travel Insurance in 2018

Updated: 6/25/2018 | June 25th, 2018

Travel insurance is one of the most important things you’ll need for your trip. You wouldn’t have a car without car insurance, a home without home insurance, and you can’t have a trip without travel insurance.

Why? Because travel insurance is what will provide you with medical coverage when you get sick or injured, reimburse you when your camera breaks, your flight is canceled, a family member dies and you have to come home, if lose a bag, or something is stolen. It’s all-purpose emergency coverage and is the single most important thing you should get for your trip (but hope to never have to use). It’s the one thing I strongly, strongly advise travelers to never leave home without because I’ve seen it help so many – and so many others regret being cheap and not getting it! For only a few dollars a day, buying travel insurance a no-brainer.

I used it for a doctor in Argentina, when my camera broke in Italy, my eardrum popped in Thailand, and my luggage was stolen in South Africa. Each time I was reimbursed my expenses and was made whole again as they like to say.

Travel insurance was there when my friend had to be helicoptered out of the Amazon after he fell off a boat, when friend’s father died and she had to fly home, and another got her bag stolen. Travel insurance makes sure you don’t lose money and are always protected. (My favorite travel insurance provider is World Nomads. They always have my back when something like the above happens. I’ve been using them since 2003.)

Since most health programs don’t cover you overseas and credit cards offer really limited protection, buying travel insurance is something you definitely need to protect against the unknown. After all, you don’t want to end up like my friend who didn’t have insurance when her computer was stolen and had to pay out of pocket for a new one.

Since travel insurance is one of the most complex, important and confusing aspects of trip planning, I want to break it down for you, help you understand what it is about, and show how to pick the best travel insurance plans in just a few steps:

What to look for in a great travel insurance plan

Insurance is a billion-dollar business, and everyone wants their hand in the cookie jar, thus you face a mind-numbing number of choices that can be confusing and overwhelming. And, often, in the fine print, you’ll find that plans aren’t as good as you thought.

First, make sure your travel insurance offers a high coverage limit on your medical expenses. A good company will provide up to $100,000 in coverage care, though more expensive policies will cover you for higher amounts. The maximum coverage limit you can find is around $1,000,000 USD, though I’m not sure why you would ever need a limit that large. High coverage limits are important because if you get sick, injured, or need serious attention and have to seek professional care, you want to make sure your high hospital bills are covered. The worst thing you can do is go cheap and get a policy with a $20,000 coverage limit, break a leg, and reach that limit before they are done taking care of you. Don’t be cheap with your health. Get minimum coverage of $100,000.

Second, you want to make sure your travel insurance policy also covers emergency evacuation and care that is separate from your medical coverage. If you are hiking in the woods and you break your leg, your policy should cover your evacuation to the hospital. If a natural disaster occurs and you need to be evacuated to somewhere else, your plan should cover that as well. This protection should cover an expense of up to $300,000 USD.

Additionally, evacuation also should mean from the hospital to your home country. Standard emergency evacuation usually includes this provision, but it’s important you double-check a company will cover the cost of your flight back home if you need it.

Third, great travel insurance plan will always include the following provisions:

Cover most countries in the world

Some coverage for your electronics (and have the option for a higher coverage limit)

Cover injury and sudden illnesses

Twenty-four hour emergency services and help (you don’t want to call to be told to call back later)

Cover lost, damaged or stolen possessions like jewelry, baggage, documents, cameras, etc.

Cover cancellations such as hotel bookings, flight, and other transportation bookings if you have a sudden illness, death in the family, or some other emergency

Cover emergencies, strife in the country visited, etc., that cause you to head home early

Have financial protection if any company you are using goes bankrupt and you are stuck in another country

A quick note on electronics: Most companies only have a small limit, usually up to $500 USD, as part of their basic coverage. You can often buy supplemental insurance to get a higher amount of coverage. For instance, Clements Insurance offers special coverage for your electronics. Prices vary depending on the country you visit ($145-195 per plan). Moreover, many regular and home insurance companies such as State Farm offer insurance plans that can help you cover your electronics. Be sure to check if you find a travel with a lot of gear!

What’s not covered by your travel insurance

Know what is also not covered by your plan. Most policies do not cover:

Accidents sustained while participating in extreme adventure activities such as hang gliding, paragliding, or bungee jumping unless you pay extra.

Alcohol- or drug-related incidents,

Carelessness in handling your possessions and baggage.

You won’t get reimbursed if the problem happened because you were reckless (how “reckless” is defined is a matter up to each company).

Pre-existing conditions or general check-ups. For example, if you have diabetes and need to buy more insulin, you won’t be covered. If you want to go see a doctor for a general check-up, you aren’t covered either.

Cash

Your theft coverage won’t cover you if you left something in plain sight or unattended.

If civil unrest makes your destination unsafe but your government hasn’t called for an evacuation, you’re probably out of luck too.

Travel Insurance Loopholes: What To Look For

Even the best travel insurance have their limits. Often, in the fine print, you’ll find that plans aren’t as good as you thought.

The medical portion of travel insurance is more about emergency care than being a replacement for your normal healthcare. A lot of people purchase travel insurance get disappointed when they find out they can’t go get an annual physical with it.

Remember you will get what you pay for. Maybe you see two companies offer similar plans but one is really cheap? Why? Usually it’s because the devil is in the details and they could have smaller payouts, take longer to process claims, deny more people, or have so many rules in the fine print that it turns out you aren’t going to get paid when you think you are!

Travel insurance is accident insurance. It is there to protect you in case of emergency and, if need be, get you home in a hurry. If you want a global health plan (because you now live in Beijing), you need a completely different type of plan.

To summarize:

If you want: Include this in your travel insurance policy: Payment for expenses if you get sick or injured on a trip Travel medical and accident coverage To be taken to the nearest hospital or flown home if necessary Emergency evacuation and repatriation Reimbursement if you get sick and have to cancel or end your trip early Trip cancellation AND trip interruption Payment for lost, stolen or damaged luggage or goods Theft and lost coverage Help finding a doctor abroad 24-hour assistance Payment for rental car damage Car collision insurance (CDW)

The Best Travel Insurance Companies

The world is FILLED with insurance companies. You’re going to come across thousands in your searches for a good provider so I’m going to list my favorites. Below are the companies I would be OK with my mother using. If you’ve found a company and it’s not listed here, it’s because I wouldn’t use them. I’ve researched hundreds of policies over the last ten years and have found the following companies to be good:

Clements – Great travel insurance for high-end electronics coverage.

IM Global – The closest thing to normal health insurance like you have back home that allows you to see doctors and make regular appointments when you. This is best for long-term expats living overseas.

MedJet Assist – A good company all around for travel insurance that offers standard, cookie cutter plans.

STA Travel – For cheap folks who just want a cheap plan with very limited coverage, STA Travels offers bare bones planes.

If you’re a senior and over 65, use Insure My Trip. Many insurance companies don’t cover seniors or, if they do, are bloody expensive! Insure My Trip offers the best coverage and prices for older travelers and I suggest you use them.

My favorite company is World Nomads. I’ve been using them since I started traveling in 2003. They are very reputable, and claims are quickly and fairly processed. This is a company built by an ex-nomad so he gets the traveler mindset. I enjoy World Nomads because I can purchase and renew my insurance policy online in a matter of minutes, they have a very friendly and responsive staff who answer questions and help solve problems via social media, they have great customer feedback, and most importantly, they provide a lot of coverage at a fair price. If there’s one company I would recommend, I would say go with them. They are also endorsed by Lonely Planet and National Geographic, which tells you how good they are!

Buy Your Travel Insurance As Soon As Possible

Even though you can wait until you leave, it’s best to get your travel insurance as soon as possible. Every day you wait, there’s a chance something could happen and you can’t get a travel insurance after the fact. If a hurricane ruins your trip, your travel insurance would only cover you if you bought it before the hurricane formed. Buy a plan the day after you go to the doctor but before he tells you you’re sick? Your plan won’t cover you since your original visit happened BEFORE the plan!

Don’t wait to get insurance. I’ve seen it happen too often. The second you know you are going somewhere and have the dates, buy travel insurance!

There’s a 99.99% chance you will never need to use the policy you bought, but accidents happen and life on the road is uncertain. It’s better to be safe than sorry, especially when you are in a different country, thousands of miles from home.

Don’t want to end up like my friend in Peru, who decided against coverage, only to break her arm and have to spend lots of money to get it fixed in Lima.

Be smart and get travel insurance.

You can use the widget below to find an insurance plan for your trip:

  STILL CONFUSED? READ NEXT —-> 10 common questions (and answers) about your travel insurance

P.S. –  If you’ve found this article helpful, please consider booking via the links here as it helps keep the website community supported and advertiser free. All the companies are ones I use myself in my own travels. If you have any questions, email me!

The post How to Buy the Best Travel Insurance in 2018 appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

from Traveling News https://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/travel-insurance/

[melissagarcia8]

How to Buy the Best Travel Insurance in 2018

Updated: 6/25/2018 | June 25th, 2018

Travel insurance is one of the most important things you’ll need for your trip. You wouldn’t have a car without car insurance, a home without home insurance, and you can’t have a trip without travel insurance.

Why? Because travel insurance is what will provide you with medical coverage when you get sick or injured, reimburse you when your camera breaks, your flight is canceled, a family member dies and you have to come home, if lose a bag, or something is stolen. It’s all-purpose emergency coverage and is the single most important thing you should get for your trip (but hope to never have to use). It’s the one thing I strongly, strongly advise travelers to never leave home without because I’ve seen it help so many – and so many others regret being cheap and not getting it! For only a few dollars a day, buying travel insurance a no-brainer.

I used it for a doctor in Argentina, when my camera broke in Italy, my eardrum popped in Thailand, and my luggage was stolen in South Africa. Each time I was reimbursed my expenses and was made whole again as they like to say.

Travel insurance was there when my friend had to be helicoptered out of the Amazon after he fell off a boat, when friend’s father died and she had to fly home, and another got her bag stolen. Travel insurance makes sure you don’t lose money and are always protected. (My favorite travel insurance provider is World Nomads. They always have my back when something like the above happens. I’ve been using them since 2003.)

Since most health programs don’t cover you overseas and credit cards offer really limited protection, buying travel insurance is something you definitely need to protect against the unknown. After all, you don’t want to end up like my friend who didn’t have insurance when her computer was stolen and had to pay out of pocket for a new one.

Since travel insurance is one of the most complex, important and confusing aspects of trip planning, I want to break it down for you, help you understand what it is about, and show how to pick the best travel insurance plans in just a few steps:

What to look for in a great travel insurance plan

Insurance is a billion-dollar business, and everyone wants their hand in the cookie jar, thus you face a mind-numbing number of choices that can be confusing and overwhelming. And, often, in the fine print, you’ll find that plans aren’t as good as you thought.

First, make sure your travel insurance offers a high coverage limit on your medical expenses. A good company will provide up to $100,000 in coverage care, though more expensive policies will cover you for higher amounts. The maximum coverage limit you can find is around $1,000,000 USD, though I’m not sure why you would ever need a limit that large. High coverage limits are important because if you get sick, injured, or need serious attention and have to seek professional care, you want to make sure your high hospital bills are covered. The worst thing you can do is go cheap and get a policy with a $20,000 coverage limit, break a leg, and reach that limit before they are done taking care of you. Don’t be cheap with your health. Get minimum coverage of $100,000.

Second, you want to make sure your travel insurance policy also covers emergency evacuation and care that is separate from your medical coverage. If you are hiking in the woods and you break your leg, your policy should cover your evacuation to the hospital. If a natural disaster occurs and you need to be evacuated to somewhere else, your plan should cover that as well. This protection should cover an expense of up to $300,000 USD.

Additionally, evacuation also should mean from the hospital to your home country. Standard emergency evacuation usually includes this provision, but it’s important you double-check a company will cover the cost of your flight back home if you need it.

Third, great travel insurance plan will always include the following provisions:

Cover most countries in the world

Some coverage for your electronics (and have the option for a higher coverage limit)

Cover injury and sudden illnesses

Twenty-four hour emergency services and help (you don’t want to call to be told to call back later)

Cover lost, damaged or stolen possessions like jewelry, baggage, documents, cameras, etc.

Cover cancellations such as hotel bookings, flight, and other transportation bookings if you have a sudden illness, death in the family, or some other emergency

Cover emergencies, strife in the country visited, etc., that cause you to head home early

Have financial protection if any company you are using goes bankrupt and you are stuck in another country

A quick note on electronics: Most companies only have a small limit, usually up to $500 USD, as part of their basic coverage. You can often buy supplemental insurance to get a higher amount of coverage. For instance, Clements Insurance offers special coverage for your electronics. Prices vary depending on the country you visit ($145-195 per plan). Moreover, many regular and home insurance companies such as State Farm offer insurance plans that can help you cover your electronics. Be sure to check if you find a travel with a lot of gear!

What’s not covered by your travel insurance

Know what is also not covered by your plan. Most policies do not cover:

Accidents sustained while participating in extreme adventure activities such as hang gliding, paragliding, or bungee jumping unless you pay extra.

Alcohol- or drug-related incidents,

Carelessness in handling your possessions and baggage.

You won’t get reimbursed if the problem happened because you were reckless (how “reckless” is defined is a matter up to each company).

Pre-existing conditions or general check-ups. For example, if you have diabetes and need to buy more insulin, you won’t be covered. If you want to go see a doctor for a general check-up, you aren’t covered either.

Cash

Your theft coverage won’t cover you if you left something in plain sight or unattended.

If civil unrest makes your destination unsafe but your government hasn’t called for an evacuation, you’re probably out of luck too.

Travel Insurance Loopholes: What To Look For

Even the best travel insurance have their limits. Often, in the fine print, you’ll find that plans aren’t as good as you thought.

The medical portion of travel insurance is more about emergency care than being a replacement for your normal healthcare. A lot of people purchase travel insurance get disappointed when they find out they can’t go get an annual physical with it.

Remember you will get what you pay for. Maybe you see two companies offer similar plans but one is really cheap? Why? Usually it’s because the devil is in the details and they could have smaller payouts, take longer to process claims, deny more people, or have so many rules in the fine print that it turns out you aren’t going to get paid when you think you are!

Travel insurance is accident insurance. It is there to protect you in case of emergency and, if need be, get you home in a hurry. If you want a global health plan (because you now live in Beijing), you need a completely different type of plan.

To summarize:

If you want: Include this in your travel insurance policy: Payment for expenses if you get sick or injured on a trip Travel medical and accident coverage To be taken to the nearest hospital or flown home if necessary Emergency evacuation and repatriation Reimbursement if you get sick and have to cancel or end your trip early Trip cancellation AND trip interruption Payment for lost, stolen or damaged luggage or goods Theft and lost coverage Help finding a doctor abroad 24-hour assistance Payment for rental car damage Car collision insurance (CDW)

The Best Travel Insurance Companies

The world is FILLED with insurance companies. You’re going to come across thousands in your searches for a good provider so I’m going to list my favorites. Below are the companies I would be OK with my mother using. If you’ve found a company and it’s not listed here, it’s because I wouldn’t use them. I’ve researched hundreds of policies over the last ten years and have found the following companies to be good:

Clements – Great travel insurance for high-end electronics coverage.

IM Global – The closest thing to normal health insurance like you have back home that allows you to see doctors and make regular appointments when you. This is best for long-term expats living overseas.

MedJet Assist – A good company all around for travel insurance that offers standard, cookie cutter plans.

STA Travel – For cheap folks who just want a cheap plan with very limited coverage, STA Travels offers bare bones planes.

If you’re a senior and over 65, use Insure My Trip. Many insurance companies don’t cover seniors or, if they do, are bloody expensive! Insure My Trip offers the best coverage and prices for older travelers and I suggest you use them.

My favorite company is World Nomads. I’ve been using them since I started traveling in 2003. They are very reputable, and claims are quickly and fairly processed. This is a company built by an ex-nomad so he gets the traveler mindset. I enjoy World Nomads because I can purchase and renew my insurance policy online in a matter of minutes, they have a very friendly and responsive staff who answer questions and help solve problems via social media, they have great customer feedback, and most importantly, they provide a lot of coverage at a fair price. If there’s one company I would recommend, I would say go with them. They are also endorsed by Lonely Planet and National Geographic, which tells you how good they are!

Buy Your Travel Insurance As Soon As Possible

Even though you can wait until you leave, it’s best to get your travel insurance as soon as possible. Every day you wait, there’s a chance something could happen and you can’t get a travel insurance after the fact. If a hurricane ruins your trip, your travel insurance would only cover you if you bought it before the hurricane formed. Buy a plan the day after you go to the doctor but before he tells you you’re sick? Your plan won’t cover you since your original visit happened BEFORE the plan!

Don’t wait to get insurance. I’ve seen it happen too often. The second you know you are going somewhere and have the dates, buy travel insurance!

There’s a 99.99% chance you will never need to use the policy you bought, but accidents happen and life on the road is uncertain. It’s better to be safe than sorry, especially when you are in a different country, thousands of miles from home.

Don’t want to end up like my friend in Peru, who decided against coverage, only to break her arm and have to spend lots of money to get it fixed in Lima.

Be smart and get travel insurance.

You can use the widget below to find an insurance plan for your trip:

  STILL CONFUSED? READ NEXT —-> 10 common questions (and answers) about your travel insurance

P.S. –  If you’ve found this article helpful, please consider booking via the links here as it helps keep the website community supported and advertiser free. All the companies are ones I use myself in my own travels. If you have any questions, email me!

The post How to Buy the Best Travel Insurance in 2018 appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

from Traveling News https://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/travel-insurance/

[angrybelieverconnoisseur-blog]

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

"Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://financeandcreditsolutions.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

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Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

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Car Insurance?

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Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

Will the insurance company cancel my car insurance after a DUI in VA?

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Cheapest auto insurance?

Cheapest auto insurance?

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the ticket cost in fort wayne or indiana.

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I am a 22 year old female, and I have a squeaky clean record. I own a 2010 Impala. Am I paying too much for car insurance? I pay the most in my household, but I have the best record. I know I am young and people expect those my age to make driving mistakes, but I'd like to know if about $1000 a year is the going rate for insurance. That's a lot of money, and I'd rather use it to save toward a master's degree...""

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I know nothing about life insurance but I would like to buy some to assure me and my kids will be taken care of in the event my husband passes. He only has one 1 issue which is Rheumatoid arthritis, otherwise in good health. . Me and my husband are both close to 50 years old. What is the best insurance to purchase? I know that term insurance expires. Does that mean if you do not pass within the term you do not get any money back that you have paid into it?. Thinking about a 250.000 dollar policy. Thank you.""

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What 600cc Sports Bike is cheapest to Insurance?

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Does anyone know an auto insurance agency that offers affordable insurance to drivers with a bad driving?

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How does life insurance work?

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Do I need an insurance license in California?

If I work for a licensed insurance agent in California by calling present clients to see if they need more or different insurance and ask questions to get a quote do I need to be licensed? The licensed agent will give all quotes.

How is the mandate to buy car insurance different than the mandate to buy health insurance?

This seems to be a popular talking point among liberals. It saddens me that liberals are so partisan that they are blinded to the obviousness of the differences. So for the record, what are the two differences between the requirement to have car insurance and the requirement to have health insurance? 10 points goes to the most simplistic and straight to the point answer.""

Which car insurance should i go with?

i've been with mercury insurance for many years now. but since i've never had to file a claim, i don't know how good they are. i got two lower quotes from esurance and response insurance. i don't know if i should switch. any experience feedback with your car insurance companies would be great.""

""How much would it be if got allstate insurance for a new 2009 nissan altima. im 20yrs old, live with my parets?

my parents have allstate. this is my first car under my name.

""Car insurance for a 17 year old UK, is it cheaper if i add my mum as a driver?""

Basically, If I add my Mum as another driver to my car on my insurance, does the price get lowered?""

How much do you pay for insurance for your car?

How much do you pay for insurance for your car?

Why does my car insurance quotes do this.....?

when I first passed my test 3 years ago at age 17 my insurance was almost 6000 for third party only on a ford fiesta. this was the rough price for this make/model on all insurance companies i got a quote from. Two weeks ago i did a quote for a fiesta hoping its reduced in price (three years later, havent drove since i passed my test ) and third party only was roughly 2000 with all companies i tried and FULLY COMP has been roughly 900-1000 with all companies i have recently tried. so why is fully comp alot more cheaper than third party only? I Have tried quotes with lots of different companies and gocompare and they all came up really cheap. However, today I done another quote on a fiesta I was hoping to buy today, and the quotes have come up at between 1800 and 3000. All details have always been the same- all quotes i have done have been on a 1.2 ford fiesta. so firstly why is FULLY COMP cheaper than THIRD PARY and why has my insrunce suddenly gone from cheap to expensive within the last few days? thanks""

How much life insurance do I need? How long?

Hi, I am 31, married, in decent health (don't smoke). No kids, but planning for one next year. How much life insurance do I need? Thinking about a term policy for $500,000, but not sure if I need it for 10, 20 or 30 years? Any advice much appreciated. Annual income is the $100,000 range. Thanks.""

Insurance question for 17 yr old driver (sports cars)?

At the end of the summer I am allowed to buy my own car. At that time I will have been driving for about a year and a half under my parent's insurance. I have 2 options as far a buying a car: putting about a $5000 down payment on a car and my parents paying off the rest before I graduate college, or buying a car for $5000. The cars I would buy for $5000 would either be a mitsubishi 3000gt or a nissan 300zx. I like both of these cars, but they're not very professional and since I hopefully will have whatever car I buy through college, I want something that doesn't scream hey i'm fresh out of high school and stuck with a sports car! As far as putting a $5000 down payment at a local dealership, my limit is about $16,000 at the most. For 16,000 I was looking at a used (obviously) BMW M3, Mazda Rx8, and Audi A4, or (if I get extremely lucky and stumble upon a) Infiniti G35. These cars look a little more mature than the ones I would buy for $5000.""

What is the best web site for comparing car insurance rates?

What is the best web site for comparing car insurance rates?

Car insurance.......?

hey guys, i was just wondering how much car insurance would be for me. i am 20 years old and just recently starting driving and when i say recently i mean like today haha!. but anyones i DO know that to get a real SET price i would have to call and get a quote but i was hoping to here from some of yall about how much YOU pay each month, how old you are and what kind of car you drive, just to get an ideal of how much its going to be for me ya know? thanks for the help""

""How much is car insurance in Vancouver, BC Canada?""

Also, the auto plan premium if you are only using the vehicle for school (depending on how far the place is from home), work, shopping, and walking the dog (parks are too far)? I do not live in Vancouver as of yet, but soon will be. I need insurance for my car first.""

I live in PA...I never had car insurance but I'm buying my first car. I can't get a car insurance quote so...

how can I drive the car off the lot if I don't have insurance? I'm lost...can somebody help me solve this problem? Thank you.

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

In wreck in oklahoma with out insurance what wil happen to me?

was in wreck with out insurance there were people hurt what could happen to her?

Insurance for teen driver?

i live in california and i just turned 18 and i got my license back in december. i want to know if say my parent's car has insurance, does that mean anyone can drive it? or is there such thing as each individual person needs to have insurance along with insurance for the car for it to be driven legally?""

How can we get health care to be more affordable?

55,000 to 100,000+ got an appendectomy is just too much for the average person with a savings under 2,000 ...show more""

Should I buy my own insurance?

I'm a named driver under my husband's insurance for 2 years. Just brought another car, if the insurance under my name + husband it cost 450, if under my husband's name + me it cost only 200, is't better buy my owne one?""

How much does car insurance cost for a teen driver in AZ?

I'm 17 & I Just Bought A 2002 Chevy Cavalier LS. & I Need To Pay My Own Insurance. If I Want Full Coverage How Much Will That Be? I Know Some Insurance Companies Take Grades Into Consideration & I'm An A&B Straight Student

What is the best car insurance for a first car and someone in the early 20s?

Hey guys.. So, i'm only 22 years old and i'm looking to to buy my first car really soon but first i want to find a good and affordable insurance agency. So far i'm looking to compare the following insurance companies: Geico, State Farm, Progressive, State Farm, etc. Any other suggestions would also come in handy.. Thank You!.""

How can I find cheap car insurance?

I have a policy with RBC. They just jacked me up by 400 a year....

What car insurance do you like?

Do you LIKE your car insurance company and if so, who do you use? I want to leave Farmers.""

Can I insure a vehicle I don't legally own? ?

Can I insure a vehicle I don't legally own? ?

What kind of coverage do I need for my motorcycle insurance during storage months? It has a lien on it.?

What do I need and what can I take off from my coverage during the winter months when I store and not riding it? It has a lien on it so obviously I need to keep some coverage. A ...show more

Will my car insurance rates increase? Please help?

I have a lease with the full mandated insurance in FL and I have Geico. There is construction on my building and while my car was parked in it's space apparently a rock or some piece of concrete from my building must have hit my moonroof and shattered it completely. I must have this fixed ASAP and am still working out who between my condo association and the construction company are going to pay for this. In the meantime I need to know if I call Geico about this incident will I be in jeopardy of having my rates increased? The car was parked in it's space, I was not driving, and it was not my fault. Thank you for answering.""

Car insurance quotes online?

Where can i find good companies info on quotes in online

How much will my liability insurance be a month?

I'm buying a 1996 Mitsubishi eclipse gs and I'm a 16 year old girl. I'm completely paying it off. So roughly how much will my insurance be a month? Any tips for a first time car owner?

Cheapest insurers for a first time 18yrold with pass plus??

Hi iv'e just brought a 2002 vw polo and wanted to get my first insurance on it. Can you recommend any cheap insurers for first time drivers and young drivers. I've completed my pass plus as well. Thanks for the help xxx

Banned Driver - Cheap Insurance ????

hiya please can you help me i no i have done wrong so i dont need any comments about how i shouldnt be back on the road - i am willing to learn from mistakes !!!! does any1 no the cheapest car insurance company for go through when you have been banned ??? much appreciated x

How much is a car and insurance going to cost me when I turn 17?

I've got a few hundred pounds at the moment as I will turn seventeen in two months. I really want to start driving as soon as possible, but I'm clueless to how much it was cost me a year and what are good first cheap cars.. Also if anyone knows some good cheap car sites it would help, thanks :)""

Is canadian car insurance valid in the US?

if I want to rent a car in the us will I have to purchase the rental car company's insurance?

How much can home insurance cost?

i want to buy a home and i need to know how much my insurance might be.

I dont have car insurance and someone hit my car and im not at fault does it matter if i hav insurane or not?

I dont have car insurance and someone hit my car and im not at fault does it matter if i hav insurane or not?

Does Obama really believe his comparison between auto insurance and health insurance is legitimate?

Even W sees the holes in that argument. Is Obama trying to fool the least of us ?

Car insurance for new drivers!?

Will car insurance for a 19 year old be allot cheaper than a 17 year old? Both being NEW drivers.

Car insurance definitions?

in car insurance, what are the definitions of: Policy Premium Deductible""

Cheapest estate cars to inusre?

hi, im a 18 year old male looking for a new car, im looking at estates as i surf and need alot of space for boards etc. my last car, a clio 1.5 diesel was super cheap to run and tax (60mpg +) and insurance group 9 so didnt completely bust the bank. im looking at cars like the skoda fabia estate (1.2 and 1.9 Diesel) and the peugeot 307 and 207 1.4 diesels as they are also cheap to run and insure. the problem is i live in devon and any cars that are reasonably cheap are scarce. I average around 8-10 thousand miles a year. and am still in education so cant afford to run a 30-40 mpg car. any ideas? thanks""

What would my car insurance be?

I am a 20 year old male in Upstate NY and ive been driving since last september and i just bought a car (2000 Chevy Impala) and im trying to look for a good car insurer and my parents have state farm. what insurer would be the best and how much would it cost in my situation?

Boat insurance cost on average for a 52ft 1989 sailboat boat?

I am looking for what others may have paid, so when i do get a quote I know what to expect. If you have something to say that negative please don't respond.""

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

Kihei Hawaii Cheap car insurance quotes zip 96753

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