RE: How Many Disappointments Before We Quit?
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They even had to take out loans to rebuild because their insurance company called the incident an Act of God" and thus not covered.
I loathe this. I'm an Atheist. I am appalled that a company can blame a deity to get out of their responsibility to customers. It is reprehensible. It's an act of physics. Everything is. :)
When we consider all the ideas that "business" (and normal) people have, I think the failure rate for commerce is way higher than what any statistics can ever report.
While it takes a lot of effort for something to go from idea to data, to business to profit, blame is never the right thing. An analysis of the circumstance(s) surrounding the idea, the execution, the outcome, (which sadly, can only be done in retrospect) arrives at the obvious outcome.
Even if the business was in the perfect location, away from flood waters, away from roadworks, away from other things, it would then probably be away from its customers - it might still be around, but the outcome may have just been drawn out and the conclusion, the dissolution, the "given up" just delayed.
I have always thought the whole "Act of God" thing is ridiculous... particularly since actuarial science is entirely numbers based risk assessment... maybe that's why that loophole was created? To allow for an "out" when nothing else could be applied.
You're right about the blame game, though. "Events" simply happen, and they fall along a sort of sine curve of happening to any given person anything from frequently to infrequently. Invariably, there will be somebody at some point who will experience multiple consecutive setbacks, just like others will appear to us to be able to "run between the raindrops," metaphorically speaking. This is only natural, but some folks want to make it personal and ascribe the supernatural to it, whether it's "God," or "curses" or whatever.
My experience has been that much of the time we just need to let it go at "I don't know" because there are so many variables involved in establishing exact causality that not only is the calculation all but impossible, the likelihood that such a set of variables is replicable approaches zero... so "why bother?"
My father was fond of saying that "summer rain is BAD if you are having an outdoor wedding, but GOOD if your vegetable garden is parched and dying... but ultimately it's just water falling from the sky."
There's a science fiction short story by Cixin Liu called "The Mirror" that has a "computer" that can track everything on an atomic level - it is a fascinating exploration of that actuarial science, and how the development of such tech / computational force would change society - perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse.
Thank you for your reply, it tickled my intellectual fancy on a rainy Sunday morning.