The Collateral Source Rule

One of the more subtle but key underpinnings of the tort law system for compensating people for accidents is the collateral source rule. 

While it is somewhat more involved, the basic idea is that when your own insurance covers you for an injury, for example, for medical bills, or to replace your damaged car or house, or paying you disability payments when you lose income for a period of time, that you can sue for the full amount of the harm without deducting insurance covered losses.

Closely related are the doctrines that say that medical providers have a lien against what you recover in a lawsuit to recover damages that they paid for, and the right of an insurer to bring a lawsuit, called a subrogation claim, against someone whose tortious actions gave rise to the insurance claim to get back what it paid to the insured for that loss, if the insured doesn't sue.

As a practical matter, subrogation claims are uncommon and the lawyers who usually defend insureds who are sued hate bringing them, because the dollar amounts are often modest and they are loss motivated to bring them (and have less of the relevant information in many cases) than an insured who actually suffered the loss.

In substance, a very large share of personal injury and property damage tort cases are cases where the defense lawyers and defense judgment are paid for by one insurance company, and where the medical expenses and property damage claims were mostly paid by another another insurance company or credit extending medical provider with a lien on what was paid for those damages, and where a large share of the non-economic damages awarded go towards paying a contingent fee of the Plaintiff's attorney.

The system provides rough justice, but the benefits of this convoluted system that arises from the collateral source rule, over the system that would evolve without it, are dubious. 

A variety of reforms have been proposed and tried to rework this arrangement, but they're beyond the scope of this post.

Opera And Ballet

Opera and ballet are skeletal stories, told live in extremely intense ways, with maximum pomp and circumstance.

Madam Butterfly, for example, a gilded age classic written by Puccini that debuted in 1904, has only about 11,000 words (with considerable repetition), less than a novella, although more than a typical short story, which is fitting as it can't quite decide if it is a two act opera or a three act opera.

Pop songs are typically two to four minutes and have 300 to 700 words (often with considerable repetition), but are often recorded and are often presented with less pomp. Even a whole album of pop songs, to the extent that people make them anymore, typically has fewer words than a typical short story.

The intense focus these culture genres place on an elemental basic idea or story is part of what makes these works primal and emotionally powerful.

In contrast, a typical single volume novel has 70,000 to 100,000 words, often is made up of several volumes, and tells a much more fleshed out story with multiple intertwined parallel plot lines. It too is powerful storytelling, but in a more cerebral way.

Planetary Defense Is Worth It

I will always be a strong supporter of a strong planetary defense against comets and asteroids. These "Black Swan" events are rare, but the consequences of even one of them striking Earth and doing great damage would be immense.

If they are headed towards Earth's surface and too large for our atmosphere to provide an adequate defense against, they are always the "bad guy."

There are estimated to be about 45 undiscovered mass extinction class near Earth asteroids, about about 13,750 undiscovered "city killer" sized near Earth asteroids (that would destroy everything in a whole metro area of a major city, if it hit one, killing millions of people), and about 214,000 Hiroshima blast sized near Earth asteroids out there. These asteroids could strike us with short notice. The asteroids wouldn't create the radiation blast and contamination of a nuclear bomb (or highly toxic chemical weapon), but would have comparable kinetic impact to a nuclear bomb.

We need both better asteroid detection technologies (which NASA's new NEO Surveyor mission which is scheduled to launch in Septemer of 2027, twenty-one years after it was proposed, will profoundly improve) and better asteroid interception technologies that can respond to incoming asteroids and comets on short notice (i.e. many hours to several days), which is not currently in place, although rudimentary and ad hoc ICBM responses could be devised that could mitigate the harm if done right (but could make things worse if it diverts a large fragment or cluster of fragments from an uninhabited area towards a city).

Image via Wikipedia.

The NEO Surveyor mission is projected to:

• Find 2⁄3 of Asteroids Larger than 140 Meters in Diameter
• Assess the Overall Threat Posed by Potential Earth Impactors
• Assess the Impact Threat Posed by Comets
• Determine Orbits and Physical Characteristics of Specific Discovered Objects

140 meters in diameter is a commonly used threshold for a "city killer" asteroid and would have an explosive energy twenty-times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb, and more in line with a never used H-bombs in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenal. 

If two-thirds of the 140 meter or larger near Earth asteroids were found, that would be about 5,000 of the estimated 13,750 undiscovered asteroids of that size in the first five years of the mission which is planned to run for twelve years.

It will also probably find at least a significant number of undiscovered global distinction sized asteroids of the estimated 45 that remain undiscovered, and a significant percentage of the estimated 214,000 undiscovered Hiroshima bomb impact class asteroids (of which only an estimated 7% of which are now discovered), although probably far less than two-thirds of them.

NEO Surveyor will also refine our estimates of how many large asteroids remain undiscovered despite this mission, and of the risk that these undiscovered asteroids could strike inhabited places on Earth. With more accurate estimates of known asteroid trajectories, more known asteroids which come close to Earth but are not on track to impact it could be ruled out as threats allowing surveillance of potential threats to be narrowed to those objects that really are something to worry about.

We are sufficiently technologically advanced at this point to build adequate planetary defenses, but organizing the planet to fund and deploy them is another matter. The NEO Surveyor mission cost $500 million to $600 million, which is less than a single major U.S. warship or Air Force long range bomber, or several start of the art U.S. Air Force fighter jets. Military missile defense technologies (like the "Golden Dome" plan for the U.S.) can be adapted for planetary defense purposes, to some extent, but aren't optimized for this task.

The good news is that the many millions or more smaller asteroids and space junk objects mostly burn up in the atmosphere before hitting Earth with enough damage to be much more dangerous than a random and rare lightning strike. So, we harm from not tracking or intercepting them is modest.

Also, a huge share of the Earth's surface is made up of oceans, large lakes, uninhabited ice scapes, thinly inhabited mountains and deserts, and thinly inhabited rural areas or wilderness. A "city killer" or smaller asteroid has a quite localized danger zone and isn't radioactive or toxic for the most part. 

So, while it might kill or injure a small number of people in the immediate vicinity of the impact, and might trigger a significant tsunami or landslide (urban areas are disproportionately coastal), about 71% of Earth's surface is water, about 28% of Earth's surface is nearly uninhabited or rural, and only about 1% of Earth's surface is urban. So, most "city killer" or smaller extraterrestrial impacts would lead to fairly modest casualties. But the risk of mass casualties from an extraterrestrial impact is much greater now than it was for most of human history, because the world's population has grown so much and is concentrated in cities.

This analysis assumes that all locations on Earth are equally at risk, which isn't strictly speaking true, but is a close enough approximation of the reality to be a useful starting point.

While there have been only a handful of attested really big extraterrestrial impacts in human history, and only a few more than we have clear evidence of in the last 300,000 years or so when the human species came into being, there have probably been hundreds, if not several thousand that went unnoticed because they landed in uninhabited areas, or left no survivors in thinly populated areas and didn't leave any traces clear enough to attested to their impacts geologically before their impacts were eroded away.

More than half of the “city killer” asteroids that might threaten Earth remain undiscovered. With an infrared eye, NASA’s NEO Surveyor aims to find them.

Image from the linked article in Science magazine.

Russia Has Lost 30% Of Its Black Sea Fleet

Ukraine has done a remarkable job to degrading Russia's Black Sea naval fleet for a country without a navy of its own.

Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was once a dominant regional naval force. But the fleet has been severely weakened, resulting in a shift from an offensive force to a defensive “fleet-in-being.” What’s notable about the fleet’s degradation is that Ukraine didn’t need a traditional navy to inflict it; rather, it used drones, missiles, and targeting to strip the Black Sea Fleet of its ability to operate, offering another example of asymmetric, cheap measures crippling traditional, expensive military platforms.

Russia is believed to have lost 30 percent of its Black Sea Fleet, either to damage or outright destruction. That’s 24–29 vessels lost. Key losses include the flagship vessel, the Moskva cruiser, and multiple landing ships.

The remaining strike force consists of seven offensive warships, including two frigates, three corvettes, and two submarines. So the fleet still exists, but its offensive capabilities have collapsed. . . .

The primary weapon in the fleet’s arsenal is the Kalibr cruise missile. Before the Russo-Ukrainian War, the fleet had the capability to launch large missile salvos. But now the Kalibr can be launched from just five surface ships and two submarines, limiting the fleet’s ability to launch its pre-war missile salvos. . . .

Loss of Bases 

Ukraine has also targeted Russian naval bases. Sevastopol, the primary naval hub, has been repeatedly struck, forcing the fleet to relocate. But the new base, Novorossiysk, has also been under attack.

The result has been that Russia no longer has a secure naval base in the Black Sea, which has obviously degraded its ability to maintain a meaningful presence there. And now, with the fleet concentrated in Novorossiysk, Ukraine has a base under constant drone threat, limiting the fleet’s ability to maneuver.

As a defensive measure, the ships rarely leave port, and the submarines hide near the bases. So the existing fleet is effectively contained—still present but operationally inactive.

Missile Capability Degradation

Maintenance Collapse

The fleet has suffered from a maintenance collapse. The core issue is that there is no dry dock, and the Bosporus Strait has been closed. The result is that no major repairs have been made, and overall readiness has been severely degraded.

Damaged ships have been forced to simply remain damaged, meaning that even ships that survive are slowly losing their effectiveness. . . .

Strategic Implications

The destruction of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet suggests that large ships are now vulnerable to cheap and effective drones that adversaries can deploy in swarms.

Sea control has been redefined; Ukraine does not have a traditional navy, yet it still managed to deny Russia’s ability to use a traditional navy to control the seas.

The global lesson here is that fleets can be neutralized without a fleet-on-fleet battle. The Black Sea may offer a glimpse into the future of naval warfare, where distributed, low-cost systems are effective counters to legacy systems.

From National Security Journal.