Fantastic article. So what if one set of matket participants goes full blown denial and tries to force a economically unsound activity upon the state who forces it upon external unwilling participants aka a classic extractive empire going to war for extended reality denial? Economic idealisms or nostalgia with outsourced externalities what a concept..
Is the world becoming uninsurable?
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#202Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher. It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly. The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement. I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his…
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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinking technology will always save us is no different from divine or magical thinking. Lots of societies and civilizations have collapsed. Some were straight up wiped off the earth and we don't even know what happened to them. Western civilization has had a good 500 years, and America has had a good 250 years, but that doesn't mean things can never go bad in the future. Plenty of places have had catastrophic drough…
>Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century. Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curio…
The Green Revolution has so far just postponed famines. We are farming in an unsustainable way. We're running out of fertile topsoil and are depleting fossil aquifers in many regions of the world. Inorganic fertilizers might become scarce in the foreseeable future too.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. What are you defining as "technology"? Software as a service chatbots? Because those aren't saving anyone. And 227000 people died 20 years ago in a tsunami in Indonesia. They had cell phones and the internet. Is that pre-technology? 50 million died in famines in China in the 1950s. They had TV, radio, and computers. Is that pre-technology? Technology…
> Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years Vernacular methods of doing things have been around - without science or rapid innovation. Key point in time was invention of printing press combined with lutheran zeal to read and the western alphabet that allowed unprecedented platform for knowledge transfer. After that it's been pure acceleration. Before literacy was a major thing (which it has not be…
A lot of ancient societies rapidly adapted to problems. In my previously mentioned tsunami example, ancient societies would build their towns above a certain point to be safe from them. Some cultures used to (and some poorer people still do) build houses on stilts near flood areas to stay safe from rising water.
But in modern, literate society, people think "nah it'll be fine bro" and build houses right up on and flat against the coastline. Then entire towns get washed away.
The biggest mistake modern people make is assuming ancient societies were stupid. They didn't have people sitting in offices thinking up solutions to problems. But the reality is those societies learned just as quickly as anyone else did, and a lot of them probably had a much stronger fear of nature and didn't sit around thinking "nah bro we'll totally survive. we have technology". They knew a tiny mistake meant death. Death to modern first worlders seems like a very out of reach thing. We operate on the assumption we'll live long lives and die in a retirement home.
And Colorado isn't by any means inhospitable. There were plenty of tribes in Colorado before literate enlightened megagenius westerners came along to save the day. It has some of the oldest known towns on the North American continent.[1] Westerners may have at first struggled to survive there with their modern technology, but natives lived just fine in Colorado for thousands of years.
Tibet is a far more inhospitable place. So is Saudi Arabia. But those also have thousands of years of history all without a printing press. Arabian culture even managed to spread across the world out from the inhospitable desert and even dominate part of Europe before the printing press existed. Spain and Indonesia became Islamic before enlightened Europeans went out to save the world and make it "habitable".
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#205So what? Living without insurance is nothing crazy.
Many dogs (pitbulls, akitas..) are uninsurable, yet we see them everywhere. People just accept damages, and pay it out of their own pocket (or run away and do not pay).
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets pretend the CEO made $0 over 2 years and that $50m goes to what? - $350 annual bonus to the 67,000 employees? - Lower the cost of the 91 million policies by $0.27 per year each? - Cover an additional 50 homes in California? Where should it go?
They bank it as any insurance company should do. Invest it cautiously. Hire sound decent people to run it with solid levels of accountability (including from a board of directors that is mostly made up of a rotating number of clients). Do it from the beginning of the company. Grow your staff slowly. Build enough of a cushion that can last the company years. Right? Right? I'd run that company well for $250k/annually +…
> They bank it as any insurance company should do. Invest it cautiously.
I hope they aren't investing that capital. AFAIK, insurance capital needs to be liquid, for it to be ready for a payout.
You still didn't address my point is that $25m/yr is a drop in the ocean. "investing $25m properly" will have zero impact on the business.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#207Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher. It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly. The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement. I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his…
I don't think its necessarily the case what people don't want, but I assume that type of build doesn't come cheap and people find existing homes expensive enough.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alleyways are good. They help prevent trash and smell from being on the streets people use. NYC doesn’t have them and the city smells terrible from all of the garbage
OK it’s not just an alleyway but an entire half of a city block trash heap with dumpsters make one think that they neglected to build anything nice in that fourth corner. Oh and two streets away are tribes of homeless people. Watch the first 5 seconds of my video. In fact my video literally shows trash on the street as well in SF, as well as homeless. Seriously, other cities have city hall. There are no dumpsters aro…
There are 8k homeless in SF and 350k homeless in NYC. I was surprised at the huge difference!
Larger buildings like a city hall or Lincoln center will have better waste management than a bodega or small shop. The larger places will have a loading dock and probably a compactor. Source: I worked at a waste tech company
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Price caps always seem like such a transparent political move.
How about profit caps? I feel like government stepping in and being the insurer with a sufficiently large pool of risk to spread around lets them set a fair rate without the need to make a return or answer to shareholders. To some extent this has helped with health insurance. Each year I get a check back from my insurer saying they didn't spend enough on my care vs my premiums.
> I feel like government stepping in and being the insurer with a sufficiently large pool of risk to spread around lets them set a fair rate without the need to make a return or answer to shareholders.
Youre about 20-30 years late to the game, but arrive in time to see the conclusion does not match your assumption. See california for fire, florida for fstorm damage, and everywhere in the us for federal flood coverage. It doesnt work. CA FAIR has higher rates to account for increasing the coverage pool, but it doesnt look like premiums will cover the current or future loses. Which is the universal story when your policy attracts all the high risk/payout buyers. And FAIR, roughly, is setup to go recoup losses from all the _other_ insurance providers in the state. Even ones not insuring those policy holders _or that type of insurance_. Its just a layer of indirection to subsidize fire risk against all poly holders.
Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?
#210The problem is the materials used. Greedy developers building junk homes and making bank. People in those areas are able to afford fire resistant housing but most of them are being swindled into buying stick homes. The few properly designed homes fared far better. Code needs to be updated and consumers need to be educated.