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“Protect your investment”

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I have been looking around a car insurance quotes for when I get my big pickup truck. I am focusing getting insurance to protect my assets from liability and catastrophic loss after an crash (such as totaling a new vehicle within a few years).

Today, I saw a insurance ad that advertised “protect[ing] your investment“.

That triggered me on so many levels, as an automobile is not an investment but a consumption item. Maybe a car is an pricey item, but it something you buy to get enjoyment out of temporarily, use it up, then send to scrap yard and ultimately the landfill. I do blame marketers, especially who foist advertising for financed automobiles and extended warranties as furthering the public’s confusion between the two. Also, it is a terrible way to buy insurance – which should focus on preventing catastrophic loss – not pain.

Google Gemini AI often has excellent summaries of concepts.

In simple terms, an investment is an asset you buy today with the expectation that it will grow in value or generate income in the future. Unlike a regular purchase (consumption) where you spend money for immediate use, investing is about putting your resources—such as money, time, or effort—to work to create a greater benefit later. 

In economics and personal finance, a consumption purchase is the acquisition of goods and services for current utility or immediate satisfaction. Unlike an investment, which is intended to grow in value or generate future income, consumption is generally “used up” or depreciates over time.

The company Ridwell tries to recycle the really difficult plastics – Los Angeles Times

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The company Ridwell tries to recycle the really difficult plastics – Los Angeles Times

Manufacturers of plastic packaging, not consumers, should pay for recycling products and packaging at the end of their life, he said. For regular people, “having to pay an extra fee to handle the unrecyclable plastic packaging that is thrust upon us every day is antithetical to every concept of producer responsibility.”

Earlier this month, the anti-plastic group Beyond Plastics published a disparaging report on boutique waste haulers, including Ridwell, accusing them of providing cover for plastic and packaging manufacturers who want people to believe their waste is being recycled. a Ridwell employee inserts a bag of recyclables into a compressing machine A Ridwell employee inserts a bag of recyclables into a bailer at the San Leandro warehouse.

Ridwell offered a visitor a tour of its Bay Area warehouse in San Leandro. The spacious facility behind a Home Depot and Walmart was crowded with steel drums filled with alternating layers of batteries and fire-retardant pellets, boxes of light bulbs and piles of used clothes, all destined for recyclers, upcyclers and thrift stores.

While the public may think of recycling as a largely physical process, it’s actually a market: a function of how well a material can be profitably turned into something else.