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Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#181

Post by [deleted] »

Mz wrote: post #94
bmm6o wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of the reason few private insurers offer flood insurance. They understand they there isn't enough information to properly price the risk. The historic data is spotty, we don't understand the geography well enough, you have to understand how construction and urbanization affects water absorption over long distances. If everyone who claimed to know what a 500-year storm looked like had to pay out every tim…

No, that isn't why. I worked in insurance. Not homeowners insurance, but I had a certificate and processed claims. The reason is that most human settlements occur in flood plains because we cannot live without water. We drink it. We bath in it. We irrigate crops with it. Flood plains have fertile soil. We use rivers and oceans for essential cargo transit. Insurance is about risk management. It is a form of betting. A…

[deleted]

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#182

Post by yardie »

koolba wrote: post #175
emeraldd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe it's a reference to the fact that even large companies, Apple is $800b, don't have all that cash on hand. To convert $15b into cash takes time. Disaster victims can't exactly pay for hotels or buy foods with bonds or stock certificates.

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#183

Post by srean »

curiouscats wrote: post #11
bkohlmann wrote: post #2

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 500 year flood event is very likely new data that tells us our prediction it was a 1 in 500 year event was wrong. http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2008/07/13/500-year-floods/ It is of course possible, it was actually a once in 500 year event. I just believe it is much more likely our previous conclusion was faulty. Our prediction of 500 year floods is not very good, we rely on way less than 500 years of data.…

Your comment goes on to show that human intution aligns with an assumption that things are distributed with a thin tail (for example Gaussian like). On the other hand if the phenomena has a fat tail (Pareto for example) then runs of such 'extremes' are not unusual.

What is interesting is that one of the motivations (funding wise) for understanding fat tailed distribution, extreme value distributions were indeed flooding and dyke failure events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_value_theory#Univariat...

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#184

Post by honestoHeminway »

ars wrote: post #79
blondie9x wrote: post #61

The fundamental takeaway from this article is about half way down. Major flood events are occurint more frequently. What was once likely to hit a city every 500 years is happening to more cities on a planetary scale more frequently.

I know it's easy to blame climate change for anything and everything, but that's simply incorrect. The actual takeaway is that our data is wrong, these floods occur more often than we thought. With only 150 years of good data, it's impossible to calculate "500 year" events accurately. You would need around 5,000 years of data to do that, and we don't have it. So we ended up significantly underestimating how often the…

Shouldnt there be more data in geologic strata? Flooding leaves distinct marks if i remember correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Houston

Would love to ask these gentlefolks that question: http://www.beg.utexas.edu/presentations/2005_presentations/b...

https://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/841632

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#185

Post by lr4444lr »

schoen wrote: post #107
Mz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of life insurance is term insurance. So the bet is "will you die during the years that your policy is in force?" Whole life is much, much more expensive.

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).

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#186

Post by dogruck »

XorNot wrote: post #171
dogruck wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets also did not collapse when Donny won. But, hey, what do markets know?

They also didn't collapse till 2008. Then they did. Markets are stupid.

Do you have a suggested alternative guide and judge? Perhaps religious leaders and liberal journalists?

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#187

Post by fallingfrog »

bmm6o wrote: post #58
curiouscats wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 500 year flood event is very likely new data that tells us our prediction it was a 1 in 500 year event was wrong. http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2008/07/13/500-year-floods/ It is of course possible, it was actually a once in 500 year event. I just believe it is much more likely our previous conclusion was faulty. Our prediction of 500 year floods is not very good, we rely on way less than 500 years of data.…

This is part of the reason few private insurers offer flood insurance. They understand they there isn't enough information to properly price the risk. The historic data is spotty, we don't understand the geography well enough, you have to understand how construction and urbanization affects water absorption over long distances. If everyone who claimed to know what a 500-year storm looked like had to pay out every tim…

Well, insurers will often cover you for water damage from burst pipes, but not from flooding. That's because the damage from burst pipes happens at a predictable trickle of people over the course of a year, but damage from flooding happens to tens of thousands of people on the same day. So the amount of money you have to set aside for the two cases is wildly different. Side note: This is also why your life insurance policy is useless in the case of nuclear war :)

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#188

Post by HillaryBriss »

yardie wrote: post #182
koolba wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe it's a reference to the fact that even large companies, Apple is $800b, don't have all that cash on hand. To convert $15b into cash takes time. Disaster victims can't exactly pay for hotels or buy foods with bonds or stock certificates.

btw, Apple has far more than $15 billion in its cash pile. it's over $250 billion by some accounts

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/apples-cash-hoard-swells-to-...

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#189

Post by staticelf »

Bad shit happens when you fuck up the earths temperature. Why is anyone surprised? This has been said by climate scientists all over the world many times.

Warmer climate will result in more drought on some places and other stronger storms which result in heavy rainfall and floods.

https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Re: Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years

#190

Post by HillaryBriss »

Joeri wrote: post #162
Mz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 systems fail is not merely because everyone needs it at some point. it's because everyone uses much more of it than they've paid for with their premiums. (which is why, pre-Obamacare, insurance companies used to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions and why they put lifetime caps on benefits paid.)

but a government run single-payer system is not magic. the extra cash must come from somewhere.

one way a single-payer system could obtain the additional funds needed is by taking cash from some other government source (which is exactly what Obamacare does when it provides refundable tax credits to help low income people pay their otherwise unaffordable health insurance premiums.) but there's no end to the amount of money that could require.

another thing the government can do is limit services to patients, i.e. take a certain amount of decision making authority, by law, away from individuals, especially old individuals who are very sick. ("i'm sorry, but we're not paying for that new chemotherapy. it's hospice care for you.")

in addition, a single-payer system can also uniformly limit the prices health care providers, pharma companies, hospitals, etc can charge. (i.e take some decision making authority away from that sector of the economy, again, by law.)

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