Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're in the middle of Kansas and a big hailstorm comes up there isn't much you can do. There's nowhere to hide.
If you're driving cross-country you're on an interstate. Park under an overpass.
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Mercury Spill
271–280 of 374 posts
Re: Mercury Spill
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mother told me that when I was very young (too young to remember), I was sick and she stuck a thermometer in my mouth to take my temperature. And I promptly bit the end off it, and had to be rushed to the hospital to have my stomach cleaned out of mercury.
>in my mouth Was that common in the US for mercury thermometers? In Hungary it was always "under the armpit" but as far as I remember I have seen the thermometer in mouth method in US cartoons.
[deleted]
Re: Mercury Spill
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a tough choice between being a scumbag and paying two years salary[1] out of pocket for something that was not your fault and that the insurance apparently doesn't cover because they are scumbags too. [1] The median wage in the US per person is $26,695.
I find the intuition that the insurers are scumbags interesting (not that I don't share it, on some level). After all, in this case they also didn't cause the problem, don't own the house, and never agreed to insure the homeowner against that kind of risk. What am I missing? Of course, its important to distinguish this situation from cases where the insurer did agree to cover it, but refuses to pay anyway.
Homeowners insurance is supposed to cover general risk. But over the years they have become increasingly aggressive at lobbying state insurance commissions to accept more and more exclusions to standard policies. This behavior correlates with a shift from mutually owned companies to corporate entities.
They are scum because they happily collect their premium, and actively undercut the costs of the policies to maintain profitability in the short term. They also screw with people for claims they owe. In a case I'm aware of near my home, the insurance company low balled a fire claim by 30% for quick settlement, forcing the homeowner to roll the dice in arbitration.
Re: Mercury Spill
#274Author here: happy to answer questions.
Thanks for writing this up! How'd you pay for this? Did you have to take out a loan? Did the companies have a payment schedule?
You can check out his website, it has crazy detailed info about his earnings. I kinda feel like a creeper just looking at it. :/
Re: Mercury Spill
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the context it seems likely that GP owns a condo, so bills like that would not be sent to property management. Also if anyone has an interest to lie it is mold remediation contractors whose entire business is built on exaggeration.
Exactly correct. It was my Condo, and if it was an exterior wall, then the Home Owners Association would be charged a "Special Fee" (We had recently dropped $100+K on repairing wall damage from a rain leak) - but ceiling damage would have been on me. To make matters worse, they were renters living in the upstairs unit, and when I contacted the owner, it turned out he was a lawyer, and initially all he said was, "If y…
Lawyer or no, I would be surprised to find that an HOA couldn't force an owner to re-caulk a bathroom. What's the purpose of all those damn inspections if not to discover and fix this sort of problem?
Re: Mercury Spill
#276Author here: happy to answer questions.
That's a really awesome website. I hope you don't mind me looking around. The fact that you guys donate nearly 50% of your income (at that income level) is amazing to me and really awe inspiring.
Re: Mercury Spill
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which government requires insurance on a private home? Mortgage lenders make homeowner's insurance a condition of the loan to protect their assets. I've never heard of a state requirement for homeowner's insurance. I'm in the US, though. Might be different elsewhere.
Who are these "mortgage lenders" you speak of? It's all Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and they set the underwriting requirements which include property insurance. [1] - https://www.fanniemae.com/content/guide/selling/b7/3/02.html
I own a non-warrantable property where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not buy the mortgage. The bank still requires property insurance. Property insurance is not something invented by them that banks would not require otherwise.
Re: Mercury Spill
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bigger scam is that getting the insurance claim denied will probably still either raise his rates or drop him altogether. This is a pretty extreme case of a household hazmat issue. 99/100 times, the pragmatic answer is to maintain deniability, make it as safe as possible and get out if necessary.
> ...the pragmatic answer is to maintain deniability, make it as safe as possible and get out if necessary. Seriously? Pragmatic, yes. But am I reading you correctly? It sounds like your suggestion is to simply sell the house to someone without telling them about the mercury, exposing them to danger, and then prepare to lie about knowing it was there if they do discover it (hopefully not the hard way) and come after…
Ideally you would sell it to someone with a subprime loan they can walk away from. They never make any payments, the bank repos the house. Somehow the hazmat is discovered and the bank is compelled to fix it in order to sell the house, or at an even steeper discount because of remedied hazmat. Win win!
Re: Mercury Spill
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point of insurance is to pool risk. The point of insurance is to smooth risk, not to pool it. Pooling risk is not the point of insurance as a product; it's the mechanism by which that product (risk smoothing) becomes feasible as a business model. > Look up the term "actuarially fair". There's really no need to condescend by telling me to look up basic terminology; I am quite well-versed in this topic. I didn't…
Could you ELI5 it all then, please? I was always under the impression that the whole point of insurance is that expensive accidents don't happen to everyone, so if everyone pays a little regularly, then there's enough money to both pay out the ones who end up having an expensive accident AND for the insurer to make money. On an infinite timescale it may not add up but it surely can on any practical one, right?
The best description I've seen is that insurance is peace of mind.
from an individual perspective, insurance means you don't have to worry about unexpected expenses from things beyond your control (ie, peace of mind).
Now, the mechanism by which this is achieved may be described as a pool in that it's a single company with a pool of money that everyone pays into and the input into that pool necessarily must be greater than the output.
But from the "customers" perspective, insurance is peace of mind. ie, it smooths their total risk over time.
Re: Mercury Spill
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sure they won't claw back that claim in the form of raised premiums?
Doesn't that make sense? Insurance is to cover immediate problems, but the risk given the driver increases with each claim (I'm assuming, that just makes sense to me). So, premiums should reflect this.
No, it doesn't. Because I don't get insurance coverage for a nominal fee like $1 per month. I pay a non-trivial amount of money every month. So in my mind, 90% of that is going towards the possibility that I'll eventually make a rare claim (float), 5% is going towards administration, and 5% is profit.
I know those numbers aren't right, but lets say that they are. In that case, paying $100/mo for insurance and not making a claim for 10 years there's over $10,000 worth of loose money (more once you factor in interest!) sitting around that's just for me because according to your analysis insurance isn't risk pooling but risk smoothing. So then I make a claim for the whole car, $20k. Fine, half of that comes out of the money I already paid to them for risk smoothing, the other half should come from the future payments I'll make to them for risk smoothing. My rates should double in this case.
But most people don't total their cars every 10 years, many people go their whole lives without ever making a claim. So at the end, they might have paid $50k in self-insurance risk smoothing premiums that the company gets to just keep, that's not right is it? Clearly no.
So what people actually think is supposed to happen is that everyone pays about the same amount and some people get unlucky and make claims and that doesn't get counted against them. They're all wrong, but that's how insurance is sold so it's understandable.
In reality I suspect that the breakdown of float, administration and profit is more like 30%, 30% and 40% which is why premiums can go up so much after you make a claim; you're actually making almost no real contribution towards the float at "regular risk" insurance rates. Of course this also neglects the risk pooling aspect.