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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#931

Post by gibsonf1 »

kristjansson wrote: post #927
gibsonf1 wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Santa Ynez Reservoir right above Palisades was empty for the past year, depriving fire hydrants of water. (State incompetence) 2. La City defunded fire department removing 100 fire trucks from service due to maintenance. (City Incompetence) 3 Severe fire warnings reported days in advance of the fire. Rather than take precautions and position fire trucks and equipment etc as was done in the past, the Mayor flew off…

1. Santa Ynez may have helped, however (a) you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir, but more critically (b) the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry and (c) Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome. 2. 'defunded' -> about a 2% reduction. Also it's not 100 fire engines, 100 appartus, which covers ambulance, comman…

Not sure why you would want to make excuses for management incompetence.

Do you agree that if Santa Ynez reservoir had been full as it should have been, that there would have been no issues with fire hydrant water flowing for the Palisades?

Also, do you agree that in the case of private providing of water during the fire, that an entire mall was saved because of that? [1]

Do you agree that a mayor who promised during the election that she would not travel out of country, that then does travel out of country after extreme fire warnings, is not ideal?

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14280517/Palisades-...

Water is quite important for fire fighting. Why spin this, the facts are just too clear this time.

Even if you support the entire governmental structure involved ideologically, do you really want to trust them with your life at this point?

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#932

Post by Over2Chars »

jhbadger wrote: post #599
_yb2s wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone tear down a 20 year old house? Where I live the houses are 80-100 years old and they’re better built and nicer to live in than most newer homes.

Basically houses in Japan are treated like cars -- as something that doesn't appreciate in value as in most places but rather depreciate over time. Some of this is maybe cultural from the time when houses in Japan were literally constructed with paper. https://www.learnedinjapan.com/no-buy-home-japan/

I suspect it might have something to do with the prevalence of earthquakes, the likelihood of said structures being damaged in earthquakes, and building codes (I've heard) that require re-building on a regular basis.

When you build you civilization on active volcanoes having long-lasting buildings may not be a reasonable assumption.

And, yes!, they have insurance. So if you can insure buildings in volcano country, you can insure anything, anywhere, maybe?

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#934

Post by willis936 »

bgnn wrote: post #894
404mm wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1yo and 3yo “technically” luxury brands. But the car values combined is under $100k

wow 100k for 2 cars. that's expensive.

Is it? It sounds more like the mean.

https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-flirting-...

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#936

Post by kristjansson »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #931
kristjansson wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Santa Ynez may have helped, however (a) you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir, but more critically (b) the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry and (c) Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome. 2. 'defunded' -> about a 2% reduction. Also it's not 100 fire engines, 100 appartus, which covers ambulance, comman…

Not sure why you would want to make excuses for management incompetence. Do you agree that if Santa Ynez reservoir had been full as it should have been, that there would have been no issues with fire hydrant water flowing for the Palisades? Also, do you agree that in the case of private providing of water during the fire, that an entire mall was saved because of that? [1] Do you agree that a mayor who promised during…

> mayor

I don't care about Bass. She has no role to play in an emergency besides telling the LAFD chief 'go fight the fire with all available resources' LAFD wasn't even the largest fire department responding, and we haven't heard a peep about LACoFD or the county supervisors.

> If the reservoir had been full

>> you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir

>> the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry.

To expand for your benefit, they were 6-8 hours into the firefight before the hydrants became an issue and ~15-17 hours in before the tanks were fully exhausted.

>> Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.

So no, I don't think water supplies supply made a difference at all. If you have the people, and the apparatus to dedicate to wholly one structure, you probably can save it. The actual firefighters were simultaneously fighting hundreds of house fires while a linear hurricane blew it all further and and further down the hill. They had to make the deploy the (region's worth of) resources had they could in the face of an awful situation that would have overwhelmed a state's worth of firefighters.

> Water is quite important ... Why spin this

Please engage with the reality of the situation instead of the simplified fantasy you've imagined in its place.

> why you would

Because I started seeing these talking points on night of the 7th. Certain factions were and are absolutely thrashing to attach blame anyone and anything they previously disliked. There are policy lessons to take from this disaster. LACoFD and LAFD need to be bigger, we need much more brush clearance, we need fewer NIMBYs to complain about the smoke from prescribed burns, ... the list goes on. But these real, essential changes are not shaped like 'one simple trick to stop the LA fires' or a getting gotchas all the woke dem pols.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#937

Post by poulsbohemian »

screye wrote: post #875
horsawlarway wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention. Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood). The scary ones are tornados. And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper bu…

the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings. Asian apartments towers are immune to flooding because they allocate the ground floor to parking. Can't blow the roof off a square concrete building either. Ofc, a sufficiently strong Tornado is destroying everything in its wake. But, they're rare in comparison.

>the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings.

What do you mean by this?

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#938

Post by jakeinspace »

gruez wrote: post #547
davemp wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it. When you consider that single digit percentages of trillions of dollars is still an obscene amount of money it makes sense. People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most peopl…

>People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most people. The federal government will pay you $4.4 billion a year[1] if you lend them a trillion dollars, no "shuffling money around" required. [1] current 5-year treasury yields

$44 billion

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#939

Post by rewgs »

epistasis wrote: post #815
rewgs wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance should not be for profit, and things like e.g. State Farm suddenly cancelling people's renters/fire insurance just two weeks before the fires (I am one of those people) are what people hate about insurance. No one is arguing that insurance is bad at risk assessment, but rather how they wield their proficiency with it.

If you only had two weeks notification, you should file a complaint with the commissioner here: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/101-help/index.cfm It's likely that you are not alone, but I've not heard of anybody not getting notification, despite a lot of people not getting renewed.

Thank you, will do.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#940

Post by kristjansson »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #705
electrondood wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: point #1, the fire command team captain himself refuted this disinformation in an interview with Musk. I don't know about the other three offhand, but it's absurd to claim that state and local governments in California are somehow not taking fire risk seriously. Do you seriously think that the state that has annual wildfire season just happens to be "incompetent" when it comes to preparing for wildfires?

How does the statement of "not taking fire risk seriously" explain the fact that the Santa Ynez Reservoir was and still is empty, and is a primary uphill source of water for those fire hydrants, or that the mayor defunded the fire department and left for Ghana after getting extreme fire danger warnings?[1] Because Santa Ynez was empty (for the past year), water was supplied from downhill water sources and the pressur…

> [1]

Look, it's known that reservoir was empty, but it's a covered reservoir. You're looking at the the _cover_. That image tells you nothing about the state of the reservoir at the time.

> primary uphill source of water for those fire hydrants

was 3x 1M gallon water tanks. Hydrants were gravity fed until the tanks ran out (8-15 hours into the firefight), at which point water tankers supplied responding companies.

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