Hey kids! When this happens, which it does a LOT, you call your states insurance commissioner’s office and file a formal complaint! Make sure you get a reference number for EVERY. SINGLE. CALL. you make, save every form of correspondence (email and mail) AND retain a copy of all your responses. If they stonewall you (That’s not a covered service, we’re not allowed to disclose that, etc) request a copy of your benefits, insurance is a CONTRACT and is legally binding.
Download a call recording app if you can, even if you can’t share the recordings at first they can be useful for your reference and can be presented if you need to go to court.
I work with insurance companies all day everyday and have so for almost a decade. I trust them as much as I trust my dog to watch the Thanksgiving turkey. Approach each interaction with them *like* it’s going to go to court.
im changing my name purely bc i don’t like it and we just told my family like a month ago. i haven’t been home since then but today i got back and my (extremely country) uncle gives me a pat on the back and goes “so i hear you’re my nephew now. proud of you, son” and i have to very gently say i am so so happy to hear that but i am still his niece just with a cooler name. and he throws his hat down on the table and goes “no! but ive been practicing!” so now he is calling me his nephew for fun
““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch
entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade
inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.
Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to
tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success,
leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could
be removed by 2040.
Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating
islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter
from thousands of miles away into a single radius.
The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and
27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there,
launching from San Francisco since 2013.
GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device,
but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed
“Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in
its first trial.
It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1
millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to
wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and
camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine
life…
Slat estimates
ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10
Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all
floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21
How much you wanna bet the State of California will “prohibit” use of this system, because “reasons.”
If it’s in international waters they can’t do anything about it. And I’m pretty sure the federal government decides what can and can’t go on off our coasts too, not local or state.
Slat has been working on this since he was literally a child. I remember the first posts, articles, and I think there was even a fundraising campaign at one point.
I am so, so proud of him holy shit.
^^^ me too!! I remember the first news yeaaars ago that some kid had thought up a brilliantly simple method of cleaning up the oceans, and even that first prototype was amazingly efficient in solving a problem that the grownup world seemed to have given up on. It was so simple I couldn’t believe no scientist or engineer had thought of it before.
And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!
Well done, sir, well done and thank you <3
My big memory of this is that every time he sent out a prototype, people would overwhelmingly go “AH HA! See? It didn’t work as advertised because a storm broke it/it didn’t filter as much as he predicted/etc.”
And every time, Boyan would analyse what went wrong, tinker with it, and send a stronger version back out.
There are still issues with it, like, but this guy isn’t some shitty billionaire - he’s a normal man walking the walk to clean up an international problem that everyone else is just wringing their hands over. I have no clue why everyone is desperately waiting for him to fail. He’s picked his hill, and he plods along, and if the latest design hasn’t met expectations, he creates a new one.
Whoever was all “LOL Watch Cali Ban it”: besides the fact that isn’t how it works, LAcounty has actually deployed similar systems here to help clean up our beaches. They work, and of course we’re using them.
Some of y’all are way too cynical and way too confident about it, yikes.
@kilodelta Thanks for the addition, this is so true
LA isn’t just deploying similar systems, it has literally officially teamed up with the Ocean Cleanup, using one of their river cleanup systems! To absolutely massive success
“After a historic winter hit California with dozens of atmospheric rivers, the last line of defense protecting the Pacific from much of L.A.’s trash held strong.
In the first storm season of a two-year pilot project, Ballona Creek Trash Interceptor 007 stopped nearly 155,000 pounds of garbage from flowing out to the ocean.
“Its performance has exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Boyan Slat, founder and chief executive of the Ocean Cleanup. The Dutch nonprofit partnered with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works to introduce the interceptor in October.
The system floats a few hundred yards from the outlet of Ballona Creek into the Pacific Ocean, its twin booms extended to the shoreline to funnel trash to a solar-powered system that lifts objects from the water with a conveyor belt and drops them into six dumpsters. The trash collects in the dumpsters and awaits manual removal…
In all, the first rainy season of the interceptor’s operation saw the collection of 77 tons of material, the vast majority of which went to landfill.
This first pilot year “had all the challenges we wanted it to have: heavy pollutants, lots of flow,” said Mark Pestrella, the Department of Public Works director. In January, storm-generated waves caused one boom to tear, and it had to be replaced.
According to Lee, L.A. County Department of Beaches and Harbors maintenance crews noted “a 75% reduction” in trash along local beaches adjacent to the interceptor.”
