191–200 of 217 posts
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/epz/?n=wxcalc_floodperiod
that is now here:
https://www.weather.gov/epz/wxcalc_floodperiod
According to it, the probabilities of a 500 year event in the next 500 years is 63.2%.
What I like to call flippism point, i.e. when you have the same chances as flipping a (perfect) coin is next 346 years.
A three consecutive years series does seem a bit "queer".
While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the "birthday" problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it's…
A more accurate term for what you describe would be a clustering illusion [1], and it certainly could be a valid explanation (among other possibilities) for the observation made in the article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion
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Structuring healthcare as an insurance doesn't work because pretty much everyone needs it at some point. It needs to be structured like a tax, because the rate at which you pay in has no correspondance with how much you need to get back out, but in aggregate the total sum paid matches the total care provided. That's why the successful healthcare systems in the world are typically single payer systems. However, such s…
> Structuring healthcare as an insurance doesn't work because pretty much everyone needs it at some point. It needs to be structured like a tax, because the rate at which you pay in has no correspondance with how much you need to get back out, but in aggregate the total sum paid matches the total care provided. you've just outlined a money-losing system run by the government. the reason private health insurance syste…
First, how it is paid. It's text book socialism. People pay into it based on ability and receive benefits based on need. It doesn't run at a loss.
Second, the level of care. Basically the government puts a lower bound on health care and uses taxation to do it. You're guaranteed a basic level of care regardless of your situation. You can opt for private insurance that stacks on top of that. A basic level of treatment is covered by the government, but anything experimental or exorbitant you will likely have to pay yourself, unless you have the aforementioned gold-plated insurance. Insurance is much cheaper because it only needs to cover unusual care, but of course I do pay a lot of taxes.
It's not different from a private system, because you can't receive unlimited care, but unlike a private system you're always guaranteed a minimum care.
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> Structuring healthcare as an insurance doesn't work because pretty much everyone needs it at some point. It needs to be structured like a tax, because the rate at which you pay in has no correspondance with how much you need to get back out, but in aggregate the total sum paid matches the total care provided. you've just outlined a money-losing system run by the government. the reason private health insurance syste…
I live in a single payer system country and it's nothing like what you describe. First, how it is paid. It's text book socialism. People pay into it based on ability and receive benefits based on need. It doesn't run at a loss. Second, the level of care. Basically the government puts a lower bound on health care and uses taxation to do it. You're guaranteed a basic level of care regardless of your situation. You can…
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The company would have to be huge to pull it off. One event like what happened in Houston could easily wipe out a big chunk of any fund they could amass. That kind of diversity could also be a problem if there are shared waterways, think back to the Mississippi/Missouri flood from 1993. I'm seeing 15 billion as the damages there, which is a large percentage of the "cash" pile Apple is claimed to have. https://en.m.wi…
What does this have to do with Apple? Is that just a reference to them hoarding large amounts of cash or are they in the reinsurance business?
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The problem is not making numerical estimates of low probability events or how such events are modeled: it's completely ignoring the statistical probability distributions of the model. All of the models are extremely "long tail" distributions and just about entirely ignoring the long tail. We shouldn't be referring to this as a low-probability flood but as a high sigma flood. ETA: Disclaimer: Day job includes rainfal…
I don't know much about the field, but I'm curious. How much are estimates based on normal distributions, and how much does the model consider other distributions? As you say, I don't think we know much about the tail. More than ten inches of rain may be a once a year phenomenon, but that once a year event might be twenty or fifty inches?
The rain gage analysis the software I work on does is largely based on USGS data. [1] Almost all of that data is publicly accessible and you can explore the data down to individual monitoring stations if you wander through the site far enough.
The application I work with is primarily concerned with two bits of analysis from the data in a given station: average peak annual flow and mean daily flow. The distribution used for analysis of both (beyond linear interpolation and best fit line options) is fitting to a Gamma distribution [2], and plotted on a logarithmic scale. (Rainfall is specifically mentioned under applications of that distribution on Wikipedia, so it seems to be the industry standard even outside of the specific application(s) I work on.)
[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_distribution
Anyone notice the comments for this article on WP? There appears to be a poster called "The burning bush" who is commenting with lengthy comments about every 6 minutes. All of the the comments from that user are sceptical of man made climate change. Washington post does not appear to let you sort by anything other than "newest"... which means that this commenter's posts are always the top comment. That's concerning!
NN Taleb would say this is fat tail event. It does not follow empirical distribution.
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well. ok. but, i don't see placing the blame on Obamacare. i mean that was not the origin of the concept of health insurance.
Yes, but health insurance worked differently before Obamacare. Insurance companies simply did not cover chronically ill people or people with preexisting conditions, thus they were able to arrange a "bet." Obamacare removes the element of a "bet" from the system. Just like the government provides fire protection in the form of fire departments, the government needs to provide health care. What we are doing currently…
In the case of these massive flooding, it's hard to make the pool big enough. That's why reinsurance companies exist, which can mix the risk pool of different types and locals.
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Could you then have the same kind of structures for flood insurance policies? I had to pay every year to renew my renter's insurance policy, it only covered losses during the course of that year, and the insurance carrier had discretion to adjust the premiums or not to renew it.
How could term insurance for homes be possible? Homes are (despite some fluctuations) relatively good stores of value that you want to pass on to later generations. Comparatively, once a typical human retires from working, he isn't producing much of insurable value (and presumably, his offspring are capable of achieving financial independence).