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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#811

Post by amarcheschi »

Analemma_ wrote: post #757
Firaxus wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s regulated, not illegal. “Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/05/wh…

If it's not permitted to raise the price of premiums to point where it covers the actual risk, then it's de facto illegal. Nobody will sell insurance policies at a loss.

But that's not what it's said

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#812

Post by happyopossum »

KerrAvon wrote: post #800
hintymad wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know why the insurance companies can't simply raise the insurance price to match the risks in those areas that are prone to natural disasters? I mean in general, not as in California where the government imposes strange policies. Speaking of the policy, why wouldn't California allow the insurance company raise the premium by region? Doesn't such policy benefit the rich at the cost of the poor as the rich love t…

It's more complicated than that, as always. Here's some (incomplete) background on Florida: https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/03/how-floridas-home-insuranc... Re: California, I don't understand the context for your question, or why you would think the California government is more strange than any other US state government. There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse p…

> There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.

Population is diverse and large, yes, but the state government (including the insurance commissioner) is radically biased left/progressive and has been for decades.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#813

Post by Aeolun »

rs999gti wrote: post #774
wrfrmers wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere). At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.

> Public insurance. That only guarantees you have insurance. It does not guarantee that you will be covered or made whole in an incident or emergency. See FL Citizen's insurance and other insurances of last resort as examples. What really needs to happen is premiums go up with the cost of risk. But this also means pricing people out of homes, vehicles, businesses, etc. And no politician will allow this.

Only pricing them out of unsafe homes/cars etc. I feel like that is probably a good thing.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#814

Post by lawlessone »

amarka wrote: post #686
lawlessone wrote: post #685

Obviously insurance companies, and i of course, would prefer if nobody anywhere ever had accidents or got sick etc And i'd love it every lottery ticket, and horse i ever bet on was a winner Feels like insurance companies just don't want to do their job. They're getting paid to take someone's risk and then refusing to accept it.

Not sure if this is accurate. It seems they’re refusing to take the risk.

they only want sure thing bets these days.

Imagine I bet on a horse and then demanded the bookies pay out because it wasn't forecast to rain

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#815

Post by epistasis »

rewgs wrote: post #197
epistasis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to talk to people locally, a place with lots of homes built in the woodland-urban interface, about the risks of climate change and how insurance will have to change. Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance compa…

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.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#816

Post by Aeolun »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #734
amonon wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response. Taleb would have a field day with this one. Broadly, I think a big part of the argument is driven by the assumption that the area will be rebuilt, despite being a known fire risk.

Because of the Santa Ana winds (with this apparently being more than usual), you'll continually have very dry conditions with high winds and the danger of a fire getting out of control. I don't see it as a black swan either. This is a repeatable scenario, every few years they'll probably have conditions like this. The climate is changing, maybe this will spread or move to areas nearby. I live in an area that had a sp…

You need only like 10 meters of concrete to stop any fire. Just build the houses inside.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#817

Post by hedora »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #283

American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?" The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

You also have to exclude areas that are now in flood planes (most cities), subject to freezing when the infrastructure can’t handle it (all of Texas), tornado prone (everywhere in the US(?)), and consider that the wildfire risk area for the US has expanded dramatically in the last few years.

For example, there was a red flag warning that ran from Colorado to Texas at the beginning of this month.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#818

Post by klodolph »

infecto wrote: post #702
michaelt wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we are commenting on an article specifically about the spread of fire in urban areas, as we've seen in LA this week. Here in the seismically stable UK, we had problems with fire spreading in urban areas [1] in 1666. So we banned wood exteriors on buildings. It works pretty well if you don't need to worry about earthquakes or hurricanes; brick doesn't burn. This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year old…

Less about the question (that has been asked so much now its tiring) but more on how when people do ask it, they always ask in such a negative way. Its not why are so many homes built out of timber/wood but rather why are they built out of sticks?

“Stick-built” is the name for it.

There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then.

If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles describing it. The basic idea is that you take standard dimensional lumber (like 2x4s), bring it onto the site, and assemble it into the frame for the house. Timber construction uses larger pieces of timber to make the house.

I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners. If you tried to make a stick-built house in the 1800s it would fall apart, but this is the 2000s, and they make a million of them every year.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#819

Post by happyopossum »

bee_rider wrote: post #715
leguminous wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts: * In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity. * If you have a heat…

There’s some element of comfort vs necessity here, I think… really, people could be keeping their houses at, like… 55F and they’d be totally fine. They just need to get acclimated to it. On the other hand, depending on the humidity, heats over like 85F start becoming a health risk for some activities.

As someone acclimated to warmer weather, I disagree. People work outside in 85, 90, 95° weather without health problems all the time. Hydrate and your body will acclimate.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#820

Post by icehawk »

tshaddox wrote: post #793
icehawk wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space. This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat. My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones…

> My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. I assume you mean that 10% of the energy immediately escapes your house?

Yes, last 10% goes up the chimney, so only 0.9W goes into the house.
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