Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 September 29

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September 29

South African Hansard from the apartheid era

Does anyone know where I can find (ideally searchable...) online transcripts of the South African parliament, written questions etc. during the apartheid era? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.90.82.176 (talk) 08:35, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

I think you are looking for Hansard replies called National Assembly Question and Replies but there are also National Assembly Executive Replies to Questions and National Council of Provinces Executive Replies to Questions.
Sleigh (talk) 09:11, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Here is the link Sleigh is referring to: Hansard Replies. Click on each category to browse by date. They go back to 1970 and there is a keyword search box at the bottom of the page.184.147.131.85 (talk) 17:50, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Welfare and Insurance

What's the difference between welfare and insurance?

Desklin (talk) 09:01, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Have a look at our article on Social insurance to get you started. Itsmejudith (talk) 09:47, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Insurance of any kind involves a large number of people paying in to a system, with the expectation that only a relatively small percentage of those people will be getting money back at any given time. Figuring out how to optimize the premiums against the statistically expected amount of payouts (i.e. the "risk") is called Actuarial science. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:26, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

• Insurance is a device to make risk predictable. You don't know how much you'll lose this year to crime or accidents or acts of god, but an actuary can estimate very accurately how much a large number of people like you will lose, and sell you that certainty (with a markup that you'll happily pay if you're risk-averse). Ideally, the price of insuring you is proportional to the expected value of your losses, so there's no expected transfer from one customer to another; this is not even roughly true of state welfare. (Probably the safety net services of the friendly societies were closer to pure insurance.) —Tamfang (talk) 02:57, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Insurance and Helping the Poor

Is insurance to help poor people? Desklin (talk) 09:05, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

The traditional "mission statement" of insurance is that in the event of an insured loss, "...there followeth not the undoing of any man, but the loss lighteth rather easily upon many than upon a few." (Marine Insurance Act, 1601). In some cases, those with huge resources can do without insurance. An often quoted example was London Transport, who before the privatisation of their bus services, never insured their vehicles, they simply covered any costs from their own funds. To comply with the law, they had to establish a court bond to guarantee that any liability claims could be met. But yes, if an ordinary person's car is stolen, he or she probably won't have the means to go out and buy a similar one; that's what insurance is for. Have a look at our insurance article. Alansplodge (talk) 10:11, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Similarly my father worked for a multinational company with a large vehicle fleet, which had an insurance policy with third-party cover and a £100,000 (probably equivalent of £500,000 today) excess. This evidently worked out very cheap, covering the whole fleet for a nominal fee, but covered legal requirements to be insurance - and I suppose the unlikely event that someone would run over a group of premier division footballers and run up a liability that would show even on a multinational's balance sheet. -- Q Chris (talk) 10:18, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Apart from vehicle insurance, which is normally a legal requirement, "poor people" typically wouldn't choose to spend money on insurance premiums, and wouldn't have goods worth insuring anyway.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:32, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Ah, I see we have in our midst an acolyte of Australia's recently departed Treasurer Joe Hockey: [1]. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:43, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

• It depends to some extent what type of insurance you're talking about. In general, you less out of insurance than you put in, which makes it expensive for the poor, but some long term schemes (such as whole life insurance) do gain in value, and for people without savings, being able to cover the very-high costs of an unexpected disaster (death, illness, fire) through smaller regular payments is of great benefit (in decades gone by, where there were few jobs for women that paid enough to support a family, working men were very worried that a workplace accident might mean homelessness or even starvation for their wives and children). Some types of insurance are created by socialist or liberal governments to benefit the poor: the British National Insurance scheme was explicitly created and developed to provide employment benefits to the working class (first as part of Asquith's Liberal reforms, and later developed by Atlee's Labour government). At the other extreme, you have schemes like payment protection insurance which were little more than scams to get more money from vulnerable borrowers (expensive PPI deals were attached to subprime loans, and supposedly covered you if you couldn't pay back the loan, but it was generally very difficult to fulfill the terms of the PPI and get your money back). In these cases, the only people the insurance really helps are the shareholders of the bank. Smurrayinchester 12:30, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

• In general, the purpose of private insurance is to protect property interests from catastrophic losses, whether the loss be from medical expenses (health insurance), the loss of a wage-earner's income (life insurance), property destruction (fire insurance), or lawsuits (liability insurance), etc. This implies a level of wealth that is great enough to need protection, but not so great that the losses can be easily borne. In contrast, the purpose of social insurance is to protect ordinary people from expenses that they might otherwise be unable to bear, typically retirement (Social Security), inability to work (disability insurance), or medical expenses (state-sponsored health insurance, such as Medicare and Medicaid in the United States). So social insurance could be said to be for poor people, while private insurance really is not. John M Baker (talk) 13:25, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

The purpose of insurance is to help a given policyholder try to recover from a financial loss. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:27, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

• One concept which insurance takes advantage of is a Risk pool. The idea is thus: insurance works because more money goes into the system of insurance than gets paid out by the system, but from the point of view of the policy holders, the insurance prevents catastrophic loss on account of whatever is being insured against (health issues, fire, floods, etc.) The system works efficiently when a) the policy holder pays an insurance premium which is low enough to be inconsequential, and b) there are enough payers to make sure the insurer can cover the cost of those insurees who actually make a claim. One of the claimed benefits of Obamacare is that, by making the risk pool larger by forcing more people to buy insurance, there's more available money to cover more people, and also to cover riskier people (those more likely to actually need the insurance they are paying for). In an ideal insurance market, the situation is "win-win": the insured pays a low enough premium as to have minimal financial impact on the rest of their finances, but is covered by the insurer in the event some catastrophic event occurs, and for the insuror, enough money comes in through premiums from people who don't actually use the insurance to cover the costs of those who do. --Jayron32 06:00, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Once you accept that insurance (ideally) protects you from catastrophic loss, the difference between the poor and the wealthy is simply the definition of catastrophic. If you have the resources to simply buy a new car whenever you feel like it, the loss of one would not be catastrophic (though you'll still be required by law to have insurance on it). However, the loss of your $1 billion super yacht might well be catastrophic even for the wealthiest, and they would probably want to insure against that. Someguy1221 (talk) 06:19, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Since it's come up a couple times, I'll point out that the requirement to have car insurance is mostly to make sure that when you crash into someone else's $1bn super yacht (or ferrari, or house), they don't end up out of pocket due to your driving and subsequent inability to pay damages. There's no particular reason for the law to care whether you can replace your own car. This is also one of the reasons why many small cheap cars driven by new drivers cost more than the cost of the car to insure - they aren't saying you're going to write it off in the year, just that you might crash into and write off another car which is worth a lot more. MChesterMC (talk) 08:28, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Right, "car insurance" in many jurisdictions is required to include liability insurance for events involving the insured vehicle(s). It covers much more than just paying to repair or replace a vehicle. It will pay for basically any costs stemming from a covered event, including medical costs, any kind of property damage (say someone crashes their vehicle into a building), legal costs, etc. You have to be really rich for it to not be financially worthwhile to carry vehicle insurance (ignoring legal requirements), because there's always the potential of huge liabilities stemming from driving (especially in countries without universal health care). Not to mention that if you're known to be rich, it makes you an attractive target for lawsuits. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 07:39, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Insurance comes in many forms. There are health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, home/renter's insurance, and many more. The purpose for insurance is to not only protect the poor, but protect anyone in the United States. The purpose is to protect what you are investing in against accidents, whether that is caused by a person or natural causes. In addition, there is a disability insurance that allows individuals and their families to not be overwhelmed with medical bills and expensives for that disabled individual. Insurance is offered to us to help protect everyone. Kmmi227 (talk) 19:10, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

What is the nationality of Toni Romiti ?

--Hijodetenerife (talk) 16:09, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not yet have an article about Toni Romiti, though google has some information. This is not a reliable source, but if it is factual, she was born in Chicago and raised in South Carolina, making her nationality American. --Jayron32 16:15, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

If you're asking about her ancestry, which in this early blog from her teenage basketball days she calls her "ethnicity" - her late father was Italian and mother African-American. -- Deborahjay (talk) 20:14, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Did Canada have witch trails trials like Salem did?

I'm interested in it's history. 192.47.255.251 (talk) 20:23, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

No. There were isolated incidents only, see the references provided over here at yahoo answers. 184.147.131.85 (talk) 21:11, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

This unreliable source notes only one known Canadian burned for witchcraft, one Daniel Vuil. However, this biography of Vuil states that he was sentenced to execution for "trafficking in spirits with the Indians", which means that he was selling liquor (distilled spirit) and not that he was conjuring ghosts. I'm not sure if the first, unreliable source is confused by the use of the word "spirit", which is likely, since the second source, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is scrupulously reliable and makes no mention of witchcraft. However, that path led me to search for the term "witch" at the DCB, which lead me to this, which is probably a really good start for your research. --Jayron32 21:26, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

I've corrected the section title. At least, I assume I'm making a correction. --174.88.134.156 (talk) 22:53, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

When you change a section title you need to add {{Anchor|Did Canada have witch trails like Salem did?}} or whatever the original title was immediately under the new title, or the section may not show up for those tracking it. μηδείς (talk) 00:40, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. --174.88.134.156 (talk) 20:24, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

Ghosts in Japan

Can you explain to me why in Japanese cartoons ghosts are often depicted with two or three flames around them? For example https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/308783?tags=murasame_oshizu https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/2124286?tags=ghost

I see it from multiple different unrelated authors so it must have some kind of cultural meaning or reason. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.165.15.4 (talk) 21:01, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Have a look at Yūrei. This article says certain attributes become standardized in art and theatre to make ghost characters instantly recognizable. 184.147.131.85 (talk) 21:16, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

They are hitodama (as is mentioned in the yūrei article). There's some more information in TV Tropes's Ghost Lights article. -- BenRG (talk) 03:29, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

@BenRG:why not add those information in wikipedia?