911–920 of 1001 posts
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No one can truly afford to live there, if you price in the cost of insurance. The only reason people live there is because they haven't hit the 1/100 chance yet.
If you’ve actually done the calculations with real numbers share the math. Otherwise stop assuming the conclusion.
Not 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…
In Yugoslavia, in 1969, one of the biggest earthquakes occurred, destroying several cities. After that, the country’s leaders decided to change building codes. Even today, although Yugoslavia no longer exists, the countries that adopted those codes have homes capable of withstanding earthquakes up to 7.5 on the Richter scale. My main point is that if we face major natural disasters, we need to take action to mitigate…
"Americans" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
It would probably be more accurate to say "It seems to me that the history of American culture and economic systems have led to a system whose emergent behavior is to prioritize building cheap-but-easy-to-modify homes over constructing smaller-harder-to-modify-but-more-resilient ones."
Sure "we" need to take action, but the machine is very large and we are all very small gears in it. A twenty-something buying their first house doesn't have a magic wand to wave that will summon cinder block houses into being that don't physically exist. A builder who wants to build cinder block houses doesn't have a magic wand to rewrite city building codes that presume residential construction is mostly wood. A city council member who wants to modernize building codes doesn't have a magic wand to get enough constituents to prioritize this over housing costs, homelessness (but I repeat myself), jobs, etc.
Everyone's problems seem easy when you are very far away from them.
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Tornadoes are quite a bit less common outside of North America, and especially the US. Some of that comes down to the absence of people in the places where tornadoes occur, so there's no one there to report them. The Tornado Archive ( https://tornadoarchive.com/ ) has a pretty well executed map to illustrate that. They report that between 2011 and 2021 (just the dates I punched in, so its possible the actual ratio is…
Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last…
Like we see in California, when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave. Same in Florida. If the free market truly was allowed run normally, the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there. Is that a bad thing? If someone was living in a house near where they tested missiles, we'd call them crazy. At what point can we…
You can't get a mortgage without insurance, so if insurers were allowed to freely control the price, they'd charge an arm and a leg since buyers are forced to buy. If insurance companies are allowed to freely raise their prices, then they would certainly love to do so because any homeowner with a mortgage would be absolutely stuck and have to pay whatever they demand or risk the bank taking their home back.
I think you have an idea that the free market would naturally lead to an efficient insurance price that let's them cover disasters. But markets aren't magic, and insurance markets are anything but efficient. I don't think anyone really knows what the "right" price for homeowner's insurance is in places like Florida and California.
It seems everyone is on the same "We will find new solutions to a new problem". I totally agree. Here is a list of all new solutions we need: 1) not insure places at higher risk 2) mass desalinification 3) fix US hot climate grids sparkles and/or place them underground 4) Street corridors to isolate fires in neighborhood 5) Build with more fire-resistant materials 6) Install automated hydrant towers with cameras able…
> We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough water. And then you'll have the brine problem.
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> We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough water. And then you'll have the brine problem.
I'm asking naively and honestly: is there a solution to brine? Believe it's pumped directly back into ocean at the moment.
If we make it a slurry, perhaps we could use it to pump to unpopulated areas with endorheic lakes like the Salt Lake or Salton Sea, then mine and refine the resulting slurry.[0]
The concern is the brine getting into the atmosphere -- that can likely be mitigated.
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Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.
The national park service does controlled burns in Yosemite and has for a couple decades at this point. You can argue they don't do enough but they're limited by bureaucracy, safe conditions, and manpower rather than willingness.
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You’re mostly talking about wildfires. The top 5 most destructive events in US are all hurricanes. They are the size of multiple states and bring more water in a period of a day than rest of annual non-hurricane rainfall. It’s desalinated water falling from a massive sprinkler in the sky.
I'm not so familiar with huge wind but a lot of water I got some (naive) ideas. Build much bigger sewer pipes and river beds. Build houses higher. As usual each region has his own problems. We can all agree either we move out of there or we invent ways to mitigate the problems. For the long term of course, as we all agree, reducing CO2 emissions, stop climate warming and trying to get back some CO2. I believe and hop…
Great, now in a storm surge (which is the most destructive part of most hurricanes), you have built an effective system for transferring rising seawater into your urban area!
> and river beds.
Great, now you've completely eradicated the delicate ecosystem that was living there and everything that depends on it.
> Build houses higher.
That is how a lot of coastal houses are built. But now you're more susceptible to wind damage, so you're playing a risk balancing game.
Every time a natural disaster shows up, nerds starting inventing solutions. I love the optimistic spirit behind that impulse. But at the same time, people living in those areas, including generations of civil engineers, having been thinking about this a lot longer than us.
The solutions are known but most either have even worse externalities, or simply take a long long time to roll out.
Any solution relating to housing is particularly slow to ship because, surprise, people don't like being forcibly kicked out of their homes. So houses basically only get upgraded at the rate that people die.
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1yo and 3yo “technically” luxury brands. But the car values combined is under $100k
wow 100k for 2 cars. that's expensive.
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As the governments in the US get increasingly incompetent, insurance prices are going to have to rise. Government services are largely there to protect you during black swan events, so if those services get less and less effective, you're going to need more insurance for those events.
I don't think it is incompetence of the governments. It appears to be a goal of most US politicians to add to the coffers of private business, insurance companies included, at the expense of all but the most rich Americans.