[HN Gopher] Is the world becoming uninsurable?
___________________________________________________________________
Is the world becoming uninsurable?
Author : spking
Score : 435 points
Date : 2025-01-17 00:32 UTC (22 hours ago)
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| _3u10 wrote:
| No it isn't. It's just unprofitable which means it can be fixed
| with higher rates.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Sure, but state governments (in the US) _also_ set what prices
| are allowed (disclaimer: I don 't work in the industry but have
| friends that do so I might misunderstand). And that means that
| if the state says "you can only charge X for insurance", and
| it's still unprofitable, those customers are effectively
| uninsurable.
| _3u10 wrote:
| I see that as a regulatory issue, but of course, the end
| result is the same. I'm familiar with services being
| effectively unavailable as a result of regulation from living
| in Canada. (Health insurance / not being allowed to buy
| healthcare).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There are to components, breakeven price for profitability and
| the price that an or will be paid.
|
| If it costs 10 million dollars to replace a house, the
| insurance will be out reach for most homeowners.
| _3u10 wrote:
| My understanding is that some people are willing to pay, but
| it's illegal to charge that much.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There is an issue with price caps in some regions. Some of
| those have been addressed.
|
| I think this is a subset of larger shift in the economics
| of insurance. While coverage focuses most on the climate
| change aspect, the majority of the change is driven by
| building costs. If you cant rebuild economically, then you
| cant insure economically.
| w1 wrote:
| No
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| delichon wrote:
| > Like virtually all problems, it's been approached as a problem
| with a political solution: the state or federal government can
| force insurers to continue offering policies that put them on the
| hook for additional catastrophic losses, and / or become
| "insurers of last resort."
|
| When you put a minimum on the price of wages the true minimum is
| zero. When you put a maximum on the price of insurance the true
| maximum is 1/0.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Part of this is that homes are too fancy and large. All of that
| translates into elevated costs and risks.
| osigurdson wrote:
| If people like them, they are not too big or too fancy.
| SideQuark wrote:
| It is if they cannot afford them. Most people would love far
| more than they can afford, but reality wins.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The problem with "people should aim lower" type arguments
| is eventually everyone is living in a tent.
| SideQuark wrote:
| The problem with slippery slope fallacies is, well, they
| are a fallacy.
|
| I also see you coupled it with the strawman fallacy,
| since I didn't claim anything as wide ranging as "people
| should aim lower."
|
| Pretty impressive to pack so much poor reasoning into one
| sentence.
|
| Spending within what one can afford is a long running
| method of resource allocation which has served mankind
| for millennia, and mankind is now living at a higher
| standard of living than any point in history.
| osigurdson wrote:
| >> Part of this is that homes are too fancy and large.
| All of that translates into elevated costs and risks.
|
| I was originally responding to the above parent comment.
| Agree, if you can't afford it, don't buy it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Also, they are not building small homes anyway.
|
| Developers here in the Midwaste aren't going to put a cheap
| house on a lot if they can instead put a 3500 sq. ft. home and
| get triple the profit.
| Sabinus wrote:
| And if the developers can't sell that house because it's
| uninsurable, then they will stop.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| 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 say the same about
| people building and rebuilding over and over in these disaster
| areas.
| tptacek wrote:
| Or some forms of housing in high-risk areas, like sprawling
| single-family houses, might get too expensive, and the only way
| for people to live in those places would be a smaller number of
| denser, more easily defended structures. Also a good thing.
| underwater wrote:
| Price caps always seem like such a transparent political move.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| 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.
| ladberg wrote:
| Insurance companies have pretty thing profit margins
| regardless, even in areas where profits are not capped.
| It's a competitive marketplace!
| tomrod wrote:
| I'm not sure I believe your factoid. Can you cite? UHC is
| one of the wealthiest companies in the world.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| their september 2024 earnings put them at 6% margin.
| that's not very good. for reference apple is 15%,
| mcdonalds is 32% and costco is about 3%. that being said
| compared to a competitor, elevance at 2.5%, they're doing
| well. a little worse than allstate (car and home
| insurance), which is about 7%.
| tomrod wrote:
| To be fair, they play a shell game by steering people
| towards their subsidiary owned medical providers
| (avoiding loss ratio limits of 15% to 20% by putting the
| money into providers, which have no profit cap).[0]
|
| [0] https://pnhp.org/news/insurers-avoid-loss-ratio-
| limits-by-sh...
| anomaly_ wrote:
| Yea, and after all that they still only eked out a 4% net
| profit after tax for 2024.
| tfehring wrote:
| The 6.0% margin (for UnitedHealthGroup as a whole)
| already includes that. UnitedHealthcare (the subsidiary
| health insurer) had a slightly lower operating margin of
| 5.6% in Q3. https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam
| /UHG/PDF/invest...
| ladberg wrote:
| Health insurance _does_ have profit caps, so like the
| sibling commenter said their margins are small (6%) but
| also decently under the cap (20%) in the first place.
| tomrod wrote:
| The insurance subsidiary will have a cap, but provider
| subsidiaries have no such cap.[0]
|
| [0] https://pnhp.org/news/insurers-avoid-loss-ratio-
| limits-by-sh...
| bitcurious wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This has baffled me ever since Obamacare was first passed -
| it seems that each year the insurance companies have an
| incentive to drive up the cost of healthcare, since that's
| how they earn more money in absolute terms. Is it not so?
| nradov wrote:
| That is so, to an extent. But it's balanced against
| employer demands to hold down medical costs because they
| pay most of the bills. If your HR department can save 5%
| on employee medical costs by switching from Blue Cross to
| Cigna next year they'll absolutely do it.
| gunian wrote:
| Any idea why Obamacare didn't follow the European model?
| Other than the freedom argument
|
| People on HN always talk about European health insurance
| seems like an easier route than to murder people lol
| umanwizard wrote:
| First of all there isn't one "European model", every
| country in Europe has its own system.
|
| To answer the substantive point, it's extremely difficult
| to pass substantial laws in the US due to the structure
| of its political system. The mandatory coalition of the
| president + 60% of the senate + 50% of the House of
| Representatives is a much higher bar than any other
| democracy. So laws aren't written to be optimal policy,
| they are written to satisfy this extremely high coalition
| requirement -- Obamacare in particular was very
| fundamentally weakened from some of the more expansive
| initial proposals to address the concerns of one or two
| senators and get them on board.
| gunian wrote:
| but people always talk about how insurance is guaranteed
| in europe something must be working if gunning down a CEO
| is pro the people wouldn't copying one of the European
| countries be even more pro the people?
|
| what makes senators hate something that is pro the
| people? wouldn't that give them better ratings? I come
| from a dictatorship so sorry if this is a dumb question
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Senators have to spend $$$ to get elected
| hb-robo wrote:
| There is an unlimited amount of potential financial gain
| from American politics, both in lobbying and campaign
| financing. It is also widely true that the candidate with
| the most money spent in a campaign is heavily favored to
| win the election, with the exception of the presidency
| which is more contested. Now consider that in the 2020s
| the richest people now have more money than God.
|
| The short of it is that you can get anyone you want in
| office, to do anything you want even if it directly
| opposes their constituency, as long as you spend enough
| money on them to get them in office, buy their vote, and
| keep their PR afloat.
|
| Gilens and Page (2014) found that "average citizens and
| mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
| influence" on American government policy: https://www.sci
| enceopen.com/document?vid=e4797592-9d73-4f2b-...
|
| Worth noting that this paper saw pushback for many years
| after the fact but measurably, its conclusion has been
| true since its release.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Murdering people is not pro anything.
|
| The answer was already given: it was politically
| infeasible to pass a single payer variant in the US. And
| it's not clear it would have been good even if it had
| been feasible.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| > How about profit caps?
|
| What period do you put it over for property insurance?
| Profit caps work for health insurance because claims are
| typically not correlated. The percentage of your customers
| with cancer won't 5x one year and go back to baseline the
| next. New drugs or treatments (or a drug going off patent)
| can cause correlated swings, but generally costs to health
| insurers don't change a lot year to year.
|
| For property insurance, you need to bring in profits most
| years to fund the year when there are multiple category V
| hurricanes or large fires.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| The book of business has to be large and the pockets
| deep. Which describes our current insurance market and
| the government. The way we handle this now is with
| reinsurance.
| csomar wrote:
| Sure. Because the response of a failure in governance is
| more government? What you are proposing is "unfair". You
| are essentially suggesting that the rest of the country
| subsidize a subset who wants to live near high-risk areas.
| Me too want to live in a dense forest and also have my
| house by the edge of the river.
|
| You could make the argument for this for healthcare, since
| no one can choose which illness he is born with. But
| choosing your housing location is a "choice". And you
| can/should move somewhere else where it is less risky.
| macinjosh wrote:
| People choose to smoke, overeat, engage in risky
| activities that can cause injury near and long term (Rock
| climbing, riding motorcycles, football, MMA). Why should
| society pay for these choices?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Why should society pay for these choices?_
|
| Because it's the only way to get universal coverage,
| which if you don't have, means a portion of the
| population gets really sick, jams the ER, can't afford to
| pay the resulting bill (maybe declaring bankrupcy), and
| someone then has to eat/cover the cost. Often by hiking
| prices for those that do have coverage.
|
| Do a search for "ACA three legged stool":
|
| > _It starts by requiring that insurers offer the same
| plans, at the same prices, to everyone, regardless of
| medical history. This deals with the problem of pre-
| existing conditions. On its own, however, this would lead
| to a "death spiral": healthy people would wait until they
| got sick to sign up, so those who did sign up would be
| relatively unhealthy, driving up premiums, which would in
| turn drive out more healthy people, and so on._
|
| > _So insurance regulation has to be accompanied by the
| individual mandate, a requirement that people sign up for
| insurance, even if they're currently healthy. And the
| insurance must meet minimum standards: Buying a cheap
| policy that barely covers anything is functionally the
| same as not buying insurance at all._
|
| > _But what if people can't afford insurance? The third
| leg of the stool is subsidies that limit the cost for
| those with lower incomes. For those with the lowest
| incomes, the subsidy is 100 percent, and takes the form
| of an expansion of Medicaid._
|
| * https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/o
| pinio...
|
| This 'architecture' was developed by Jonathan Gruber:
|
| * https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-
| content/uploads/issues/2...
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gruber_(economist)
|
| It is a form of social safety net.
| mgh95 wrote:
| > Because it's the only way to get universal coverage,
| which if you don't have, means a portion of the
| population gets really sick, jams the ER, can't afford to
| pay the resulting bill (maybe declaring bankrupcy), and
| someone then has to eat/cover the cost. Often by hiking
| prices for those that do have coverage.
|
| The alternative that is always there is to repeal EMTALA.
|
| > It starts by requiring that insurers offer the same
| plans, at the same prices, to everyone, regardless of
| medical history. This deals with the problem of pre-
| existing conditions. On its own, however, this would lead
| to a "death spiral": healthy people would wait until they
| got sick to sign up, so those who did sign up would be
| relatively unhealthy, driving up premiums, which would in
| turn drive out more healthy people, and so on.
|
| This misses the problem: [the ACA causes a moral hazard
| for lower classes likely to use
| it.](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8567089/)
|
| The issue is a policy designed for a highly uniform, high
| social class, high status state (Massachusetts) was
| applied to the USA as a whole.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The alternative that is always there is to repeal
| EMTALA.
|
| I suspect you think it's not great having homeless people
| on the street.
|
| Wait till you see what it looks like when they actually
| start dying in the street because emergency health care
| is no longer available to them, nor to many of their
| housed neighbors, family and friends.
| mgh95 wrote:
| I don't see what EMTALA has to deal with homelessness in
| this context. It largely comes down to uninsured, even
| post-ACA. If we can't afford the current system, it's not
| a matter of if, but when, either hospitals or providers
| leave medicare. To put it in perspective, the AMA reports
| (https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/medicare-
| medica...) that physician medicare compensation has
| declined 29% since 2001. At a certain point, it will
| simply be financially unsustainable. Whataboutism to
| distract from the fact that medicare alone is 3.7% of gdp
| and is forecast to grow to 5.1% by 2033
| (https://www.cato.org/blog/fast-facts-about-medicare-
| social-s...) doesn't fix anything.
|
| And FWIW, US Medicare spending _alone_ is shaping up to
| grow to almost as much as some EU nations on a % of GDP
| basis (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
| explained/index.php...).). Medicare isn't the solution.
| It's the problem.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| And FWIW, US Medicare spending alone is shaping up to
| grow to almost as much as some EU nations on a % of
| GDP basis
|
| Your source puts Austria, France, and Germany at the top,
| or roughly 11-13% of GDP.
|
| https://www.bea.gov/news/2023/gross-domestic-product-
| fourth-...
|
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10830
|
| The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis puts the 2022 GDP at
| $25.46 trillion ($25,460 billion). Congress puts 2022
| spending on private health insurance at $1,290 billion
| (5%) and Medicare at $944 billion (3.7% of GDP).
| mgh95 wrote:
| Yes, we are tracking to grow to as much as _some_ not
| _all_ or _most_. Emphasis on _tracking to grow_ which you
| should see the source for 2033 forecast.
|
| The fact that one program (Medicare) is growing to be as
| large as the NHE should be cause for pause.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| So your argument is that Medicare spending might
| potentially approach the same proportion of the GDP as a
| European country that doesn't spend a lot on its
| healthcare?
| mgh95 wrote:
| Pretty much. And that's _just_ one program that services
| a small portion of the population. The issue is we can 't
| make this level of spending work, why should we believe
| spending more money will be successful?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > If we can't afford the current system,
|
| What we can and cannot afford is a choice, not some
| immutable fact of nature.
|
| A cynical, if realist, version of this would be: _if we
| choose to not spend any more ..._
|
| But that's still better since it acknowledges that we, as
| a nation, have agency in this.
| Sabinus wrote:
| After a society brings in universal healthcare coverage,
| more rules discouraging smoking, overeating, and engaging
| in risky activities often follow. Which is either a nice
| way to get the people of the country caring about each
| other's health, or an awful government overreach
| depending on your political bent.
| csomar wrote:
| > People choose to smoke
|
| Cigarettes can be taxed with proceeds going to care with
| those with lung cancer. Dangerous activities can have a
| separate insurance. For a popular sport, it means most
| people are engaging in this activity. Houses on the top
| of a mountain are for a very tiny minority (and a very
| rich one too). They should finance their lifestyles
| themselves.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Because from a moral standpoint most people agree that we
| shouldn't allow people to go without treatment,
| regardless of their poor choices. From a national
| standpoint it also doesn't make sense to allow people to
| become cripples for lack of money, reducing their
| economic value.
|
| Injuries also hurt, so it's not like people don't have
| other disincentives to avoid injury aside from the price.
| This isn't the case in other areas, where it's purely a
| monetary penalty and thus removing that penalty results
| in way more of that thing taking place.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Because the response of a failure in governance is more
| government?
|
| Are you this incredulous when the response to a failure
| in "the market" is more "market" ? Or when companies
| fail, and the response is "more companies", do you
| question that in the same way?
|
| I'm not taking a position on the meat of your point, but
| this particular angle strikes me as very strange.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| I'm not saying everyone pays the same, I'm saying you
| take away the for excessive profit nature of insurance.
| If you live in a tinderbox you are going to have more
| risk and more costs. Yeah somebody has to model the risk
| and set a price, but I'm saying it shouldn't be someone
| who has an incentive to make as much profit as possible.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Your seem to be under the misapprehension the problem is
| insurers charging usurious prices. The reality is Paul in
| the forest got used to paying whatever 5kpa to insure
| against a 100 year fire, not 50kpa to insure against a 10
| year fire.
|
| It sounds like a lot, but if the risk is actually that
| high then the prices will be too. Houses aren't cheap.
| Insurance is a very competitive market, it's easy to
| comparison shop. The root problem is the high risk, not
| "unfair" private profit.
|
| (Numbers picked out of thin air to make a point)
| mgiampapa wrote:
| Yes, I'm advocating people pay appropriately for risk.
| The issue is with high risk, insurers pad profits to
| compensate for excessive risk or leave the market with no
| option other than some last resort insurers. Having
| government step in with regulation around profits over
| time keeps the rates in check. You can have a Lloyd's of
| London, but they need to have open audited books.
| Otherwise you can have a not for profit, ie government
| entity run the book.
| toast0 wrote:
| Most regulated insurance markets do have profit caps.
| California certainly does, but there was still a price cap
| added.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Profit caps presumably create perverse consequences. If the
| profit I'm allowed to make is proportional to X, then I'm
| incentivized to maximize X. If X is my costs, then... Maybe
| that's where these unbelievably high line items on medical
| bills come from.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How about profit caps?_
|
| Transfers wealth from shareholders, patients and taxpayers
| to management, bankers and intermediaries.
|
| Broadly speaking, caps are stupid--akin to treating liver
| enzymes directly when they spike versus seeing them as the
| sign of deeper problems.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think that's a great metaphor for the situation, when
| you get a patient running a 105 fever you put them in an
| ice bath _and then_ consider what underlying problem is
| ailing them.
|
| You do the first part so they don't die before the long-
| term treatment kicks in.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Correct. Caps are fine as a short-term measure.
|
| In the long term, they're putting a patient running a
| fever on immunosuppressants. The fever will go. But the
| patient will die.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Or maybe C-suite pay/benefits caps, ha ha.
| hb-robo wrote:
| I'm all for this, lol.
| donavanm wrote:
| > 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.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| In all of those examples you have the for profit private
| insurance leaving the market because it's not profitable
| enough. When you take away excessive profits and allow
| the governmental pool to compete with for profit
| insurance, risk is leveled across the pool and consumers
| pay less. If the big private insurance companies can't be
| more efficient or have better risk models than the
| government, well they should stop trying to sell
| policies.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| The people are risk pay less, all of the other people
| forced to participate in your general insurance pay more.
|
| If I live in the middle of a city in an apartment block
| should I pay the same rates to insure against wildfire as
| someone in the middle of a dry forest? Probably not, but
| govenrment-mandated insurance programs force me to.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| Premiums should be based on risk, not flat. I don't know
| where you are drawing that line of reasoning from. Just
| because the government is providing coverage doesn't mean
| it's all the same rate. Every insurance product has a
| risk model to set prices. I was just advocating that we
| have a non profit minded entity with deep pockets do it
| vs private companies motivated by maximizing profit.
|
| Public benefit corps fit this model as do regulated
| utilities.
| donavanm wrote:
| Edit: i think were talking past each other until agreeing
| that risk/cost/rates are being intentionally suppressed
| by or on behalf of the public. Kind if like this other
| housing related mortgage thing Ive heard if that may be
| mispriced/misstructured in favor of many at the expense
| of all.
|
| I dont get it. Your argument is that if everything was
| priced accurately and aggregated "fairly" insurance would
| work. Ok, totally true statement. Very much the case
| that's not what is happening now for any of the example
| markets or gov programs.
|
| You appear to believe "profit" is the problem, which is
| true in that negative profit is known as "loss" which is
| what has and will be occurring _even with the public
| "last resort" rates._ The private insurers are not
| withdrawing because their "fantastic" 6-15% margin on
| disaster insurance isnt enough. Using CA as an example
| they withdrew because 1) the state required they _dont_
| use risk based modeling for individual rates and 2) they
| _dont_ include reinsurance costs as a rate signal.
| Shockingly their CA insurance pool turned upside down on
| costs /losses in a decade or two and they bailed.
|
| FAIR is _exactly_ the sort of or youre talking about; non
| profit government mandated insurance pool, open to all
| residents, with proportional policy /loss assignment,
| rates set based on regulated-interpretation-of-risk-
| exposure + costs, regulated by the CA Dept of Insurance.
| And yes, their policies are risk adjusted, but theyre not
| _accurate_. And yes, insurance should accurate according
| to risk and (payout) costs but basically _none_ of the
| public last resort issuers can!
|
| See again florida, national flood, etc. In every case 1)
| risk & cost modeling (accurate pricing) is suppressed on
| behalf of the public 2) risk prices/costs soon exceed
| private risk markets 3) private insurers withdraw 4)
| public "last resort" insurers emerge 5) risks/costs
| continue to grow, private insurers withdraw, the "last
| resort" insurer becomes the risk aggregating insurer 6)
| last resort insurer _shockingly_ cant meet its
| commitments 7) public funds and /or backdoor insurance
| taxes socialize losses due to unprices disk.
| Dig1t wrote:
| There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to
| reduce the cost of insuring them, likely this would be the
| solution in California without price caps.
|
| You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials
| like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly
| fireproof. These buildings would be realistically insurable in
| both California or Florida. They would cost more to build, not
| THAT much more though especially if land costs many millions,
| an extra 50k - 100k to build out of concrete is a very
| reasonable expense.
| defrost wrote:
| Steel frame, flame retardant insulation and cladding, rammed
| earth, .. these are all options.
|
| Flammable trees well away from a leaf free clean guttered (or
| no gutter) house are also no compromise requirements.
|
| See: https://research.csiro.au/bushfire/ and
| https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/services/testing-and-
| ce...
|
| for the rabbit hole of Australian Bushfire housing
| certification and testing.
|
| Burning Down the House: Trial by Fire CSIRO-
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBtawn7IAnI
| Dig1t wrote:
| Yes absolutely, and as another poster pointed out,
| earthquake codes exist. Metal framing is probably a bit
| easier to adapt to the same earthquake codes that timber
| framing has.
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| > flame retardant insulation
|
| Which are almost definitely known to the state of
| California to cause cancer.
| defrost wrote:
| Elsewhere fiberglass and mineral wool insulation aren't
| regarded as carcinogens.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1947241/
|
| https://mesothelioma.net/fiberglass-connection-to-
| mesothelio...
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| mineral wool insulation aren't regarded as carcinogens
|
| A quick look turned up one mineral wool SDS with a Prop
| 65 warning for formaldehyde.
|
| https://www.jm.com/content/dam/jm/global/en/MSDS/20000000
| 205...
| defrost wrote:
| From your link:
|
| SECTION 11. TOXICOLOGICAL INFORMATION
| IARC No component of this product present at levels
| greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as probable,
| possible or confirmed human carcinogen by IARC.
| ACGIH No component of this product present at levels
| greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as a
| carcinogen or potential carcinogen by ACGIH.
| OSHA No component of this product present at levels
| greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as a
| carcinogen or potential carcinogen by OSHA
|
| > warning for formaldehyde.
|
| _Trace_ amounts can _possibly_ sweat out in specific
| conditions .. which is why you might choose to install
| with a vapor barrier.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Trace amounts can possibly sweat out in specific
| conditions
|
| Nah, it's pretty well documented heat and humidity will
| release formaldehyde. In paperwork filed with the EPA
| arguing against new limits, an insulation manufacturer
| trade group cited California's (OEHHA) exposure limits on
| formaldehyde as reasonable.
|
| Those limits are: recently manufactured
| products contribute no more than 9 ug/m3 of
| formaldehyde into the indoor air
|
| So the Prop 65 warning certainly seems reasonable from
| here.
|
| https://downloads.regulations.gov/EPA-HQ-
| OPPT-2023-0613-0230...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Steel frame, flame retardant insulation and cladding,
| rammed earth, .. these are all options._
|
| Don't even have to go that far.
|
| Wood framing is fine: make your cladding stucco would do a
| lot (or brick). You can even have siding as cement-base
| stuff is available:
|
| * https://www.jameshardie.com/blog/siding-types/what-is-
| fiber-...
|
| You could have metal or clay roofing, but shingles with a
| Class A rating is available as well:
|
| * https://www.ameriproroofing.com/blog/asphalt-roofing-
| shingle...
| michpoch wrote:
| > You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant
| materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is
| nearly fireproof
|
| Just like exactly the rest of the world? We, the non-USA
| folks, are looking yearly at either fires or hurricanes
| destroying these wooden houses there and people keep
| rebuilding them. Insanity.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Earthquakes make this a much more expensive option. To give
| you some idea, the design seismic acceleration for my house
| is like 3g. That's more sideways than down. The forces
| involved are the weight of the structure times this value.
| Concrete ways a LOT more. It absolutely can be done, but
| it's not clearly a superior material compared to wood.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _We, the non-USA folks, are looking yearly at either
| fires or hurricanes destroying these wooden houses there
| and people keep rebuilding them._
|
| You can build wood framed (2x4, 2x6) buildings that are
| resistant to fire:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g
|
| A stucco, brick, or fibre cement siding, have 2m/6' clear
| around the base of your house, tempered windows, and either
| a metal roof or shingles with a Class A fire rating.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Place a piece of wood inside the hot environment of a
| fire and it _will_ burn down releasing more heat than it
| absorbs, adding to the fire. It doesn 't matter what
| stuff you add to it.
|
| You can make wood not burn on the kind of environment
| where it would be the only or main object releasing heat.
| That is still a completely different category from non-
| flammable materials.
| rafram wrote:
| The US has a practically limitless amount of wood. Europe
| doesn't. Wood also holds up well to earthquakes and can be
| treated to hold up to fire. And if there's a catastrophic
| failure, it hurts a lot less than concrete does when it
| falls on your head. It's a great material that the US is
| right to use.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The rest of the world has mudslides, floods, earthquakes,
| volcano eruptions, etc. Or they have no natural disasters,
| just like so many parts of the US.
|
| > We, the non-USA folks
|
| Isn't that a sad way to look at yourself?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to
| reduce the cost of insuring them_
|
| There is:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g
|
| But when a lot of your housing stock is multiple decades old
| that was built before modern building codes, there's a lot of
| kindling out there.
| pkaye wrote:
| I've been collecting a bunch of links on what things a
| homeowner can do. Probably the simplest thing is the clear a
| 5 foot ember resistant zone around the home. So remove
| greenery and replace wood chips with stone for example. Use
| fire resistant vents so ember does enter attic or crawlspace.
| Use Class A fire rated roof (which you can also get for
| asphalt shingles). If you have wood siding, replace with
| fiber cement siding...
|
| https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-
| from...
|
| https://readyforwildfire.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/05/Low-...
|
| https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-engineering-and-
| inv...
| matwood wrote:
| Since you mentioned FL, we have mostly solved hurricane level
| wind resistant building codes. Hurricane ties are cheap and
| they work. Anything built post hurricane Andrew has these.
| There's also materials like Hardi Plank siding, which does
| add a bit more cost, but effectively surrounds the house in a
| thin layer of concrete. Flooding is a mixed bag. My house is
| built substantially up and off the ground above the '100 year
| flood line'. Even if a flood didn't enter the dwelling
| proper, it would still be devastating.
|
| The problem is storms are getting bigger and more frequent
| from climate change and hitting areas they normally don't.
| theultdev wrote:
| That's false. Hurricanes are not getting bigger or more
| frequent due to climate change.
|
| They aren't getting bigger or more frequent at all.
|
| NOAA has stated this multiple times and you can read an
| article addressing it here:
|
| https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-
| data/can-...
|
| It's well known that hurricanes go through multidecadal
| swings.
|
| Why this keeps getting repeated when it's obviously false
| is beyond me.
| matwood wrote:
| Great article, scientifically written. I wish it was as
| confident as you are in your conclusion.
|
| > No, we cannot confidently detect a trend today in
| observed Atlantic hurricane activity due to man-made
| (greenhouse gas-driven) climate change. Some human
| influence may be present
|
| > The importance of this distinction between potential
| causes of AMV for future hurricane projections is clear:
| if strong man-made aerosol forcing and volcanic forcing
| were responsible for most of the "quiet period" of
| Atlantic major hurricane activity from the 1970s through
| the early 1990s, then a return to this more "quiet"
| regime in the coming decades may not occur. But if the
| "quiet period" of the 1970s through early 1990s (as well
| as the earlier quiet period of the early 20th Century)
| was caused mainly by internal climate variability, one
| would expect to return to relatively "quiet" conditions
| in the coming decades as the climate swings back and
| forth between more active and inactive Atlantic hurricane
| periods. This is an important research question that does
| not yet have a clear answer.
|
| Meanwhile we continue to see stronger storms.
|
| > Another hurricane metric, the fraction of rapidly
| intensifying Atlantic hurricanes, was reported to have
| increased since around 1980 (Bhatia et al. 2019), and
| they found that this change was highly unusual compared
| with simulated natural variability from a climate model,
| while being consistent in sign with the expected change
| from human-caused forcing. Even so, however, their
| confidence was limited by uncertainty in how well the
| single climate model used was representing real-world
| natural variability in the Atlantic region.
|
| We do know for a fact that the ocean temperatures are
| rising. Also from your article,
|
| > Global surface temperatures and tropical Atlantic sea
| surface temperatures have increased since 1900 (by around
| +1.3 @C [+2.3 @F] and +1.0 @C [+1.8 @F], respectively),
| unlike the reconstructed hurricane counts or U.S.
| landfalling hurricanes. Finally, a number of studies have
| found that several Atlantic hurricane metrics, including
| hurricane maximum intensities, hurricane numbers, major
| hurricane numbers, and Accumulated Cyclone Energy have
| all increased since around 1980.
|
| But climate science is about studying a complex system,
| and finding direct causations is hard.
|
| > However, in a 2019 tropical cyclone-climate change
| assessment, the majority of authors concluded that the
| recent hurricane activity increases mentioned above did
| not qualify as a detectable man-made influences (meaning
| clearly distinguishable from natural variability).
|
| Another study linked recently from climate.gov (near the
| bottom) https://www.climate.gov/news-
| features/blogs/beyond-data/2024...
|
| >[R]ecent studies in attribution science show that
| climate change is causing an increase in the frequency
| and/or severity of tropical storms, heavy rainfall, and
| extreme temperatures.
|
| So at the end of the day, it's fine to say there is no
| smoking gun, but it is absolutely not 'obviously false'.
| I think your biases are showing.
| theultdev wrote:
| Ofc they hint towards it, it's climate.gov. But the
| _actual_ data shown, shows no increase at all.
|
| You won't find a "smoking gun" because it's not
| happening.
|
| Your biases are in-fact showing that you don't realize
| you went from claiming it was true to "well we have no
| smoking gun".
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Clearly it's not true that "no one" could afford to live there.
| And if demand was low then the housing would become more
| affordable
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| 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.
| oefrha wrote:
| There are plenty of very rich people living there who can
| afford the house burning down every single year. So false.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Afford doesn't mean you can technically throw money out
| the window. At some point, you are going to give up if
| the risk is high enough to have >2 events in your
| lifetime - time is also a cost to factor in, as well as
| loss of possessions. It's not quite that simple.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| If you've actually done the calculations with real numbers
| share the math. Otherwise stop assuming the conclusion.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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
| companies are fabricating everything. When in reality,
| insurance is one of the rare areas where risks are very well
| assessed, not just by the initial insurer but also by a second
| party when reinsurance is purchased. And often those exits from
| the insurance markers are due to inability to purchase
| reinsurance.
|
| Of course, explaining anything in detail is likely to make
| people think you work in the industry (I do not) and get
| accused of being a shill. All of which proves to me that older
| generations had a _much_ easier life because nobody so
| financially ignorant today is in any sort of position to be
| able to buy a home.
|
| All that said, I don't think it's actually a price ceiling.
| It's a limitation of what factors can be taken into account to
| set rates, and constitutional amendment from Prop 108 prevents
| the legislature from changing it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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
| companies are fabricating everything
|
| I have the exact same experience when discussing anything
| insurance related: People have wild assumptions about how
| much profit insurance companies are making.
|
| When I ask people how much cheaper they think their insurance
| (health, home, etc) would be if we forced insurance company
| profits to zero they usually have some extreme guess like
| 50%. 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. The discourse is so cooked
| that everyone who just assumes insurers are making
| unbelievable profits without ever checking.
|
| Like you said, when I try to bring numbers into the
| discussion I get accused of being a shill (or a "bootlicker"
| if the other person is young).
|
| The environment this creates has opened the door for some
| really bad politics to intervene in ways that aren't helpful.
| I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual outcome in a lot of
| these places is that politicians pass legislation putting the
| local government on the hook for insurance after they squeeze
| regular insurers so hard they have to back out to avoid
| losing money in those markets. The consequences won't
| manifest for several years, potentially after the politicians
| have left office, but could be financially burdensome.
| Similar to how many local governments were very generous with
| pension plans because politicians knew the consequences would
| only be felt by their successors.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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._
|
| Meanwhile, the health care providers:
|
| > _But if you look at the list of companies with the
| highest [return on equity], you see health care providers
| or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%),
| Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly
| (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%),
| Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on. If
| you want to know which shareholders are making the real
| money in the health care industry...well, it's the
| shareholders of those providers and suppliers._
|
| * https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-
| the-...
| rcpt wrote:
| Definition of "healthcare provider" really confuses me.
| Why is my nurse lumped together with people researching
| drugs? Is the CEO of the hospital a "provider"?
| wuiheerfoj wrote:
| >When you point out that, for example, health insurance
| profits are low single digit percentage of overall
| healthcare costs
|
| Do you have any source for this?
|
| I'm assuming (because HN) that you had the USA in mind, and
| it doesn't pass the sniff test for me given that US
| insurance fees are more than single digit percentages
| higher than other high quality care countries with
| privatised healthcare systems
| nradov wrote:
| You can literally read the 10-K statement from any of
| several publicly traded medical insurance companies.
| Average industry profit margin is about 3%. There are
| also some non-profit insurers but their fees generally
| aren't any lower.
| jwagenet wrote:
| The issue in the US is that there is no price regulation
| for different procedures (other than Medicare), plus the
| providers (hospital chains) are intertwined* with
| insurance. The end result is everyone charges as much as
| they can and the premiums need to be high, even if
| insurance technically negotiates the rates down from the
| "sticker" price. Insurance companies are willing to take
| a small percent of profit because there is so much money
| being taken from customers.
|
| * https://www.statnews.com/2024/11/25/unitedhealth-
| higher-paym...
| pizza wrote:
| Right, low profit margins are not a valid argument for
| why it's invalid for consumers to suspect there is some
| inefficiency compared to other markets. Saying the system
| must be efficient because profits are low is like saying
| boiling water should be as cheap as 98->99 degrees C
| because it's just +1 C - profit margins aren't as good an
| indicator of whether there is an unusual amount of
| disorder in the system, compared to extremely context-
| sensitive resource costs for hypothetically identical
| systems.
| EraYaN wrote:
| I think the point is more that the insurers are not the
| real target for your wrath. You should not motivate your
| congress person to do something about the insurance
| necessarily. It's probably better to look at a level
| further up the chain for example.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| These are all the publicly listed health insurers in the
| US, with public financials, so the numbers come from the
| 10-Q and 10-K reports filed with the SEC.
|
| Note that the first one, United Health, has slightly
| higher profit margins than the rest because UNH has an
| enormous business selling healthcare itself, not just
| insurance (they own a lot of doctor groups and outpatient
| clinics and employ a lot of doctors and nurses).
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealt
| h-g...
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ELV/elevance-
| healt...
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CI/cigna-
| group/pro...
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-
| health/pro...
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HUM/humana/prof
| it-...
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CNC/centene/pro
| fit...
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MOH/molina-
| healthc...
|
| The other big insurers will be Kaiser Foundation Health
| Plan and various plans franchised with Blue Cross Blue
| Shield, but they are all non profit.
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/
| 941...
| nradov wrote:
| Some Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members are for-
| profit corporations now.
|
| As for UnitedHealth Group, much of their profit comes
| from a large software business which is separate from
| their insurance, care delivery, and PBM businesses. If
| that software business was spun out it would be one of
| the 20 largest US tech companies.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Some Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members are
| for-profit corporations now.
|
| In this list, I couldn't find a single for profit BCBS
| licensee other than Elevance. They all seem to be
| mutuals/member owned/non profit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Cross_Blue_Shield_Asso
| cia...
|
| > As for UnitedHealth Group, much of their profit comes
| from a large software business which is separate from
| their insurance, care delivery, and PBM businesses. If
| that software business was spun out it would be one of
| the 20 largest US tech companies.
|
| Interesting, I didn't know UNH sold software!
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| In this list, I couldn't find a single for profit BCBS
| licensee other than Elevance.
|
| Keep in mind Anthem/Elevance absorbed a bunch of
| licensees. So, for instance, Empire BCBS was for-profit
| but as of 2024 is part of Elevance.
|
| At a quick glance Highmark and Wellmark are for-profit.
| And I believe the South Carolina licensee is as well.
| Mind you a few of the "non-profit" BCBS licensees have
| been sued over claims that they ought not be considered
| not-for-profit.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Highmark is non profit:
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/
| 821...
|
| Wellmark is a mutual insurance company (profits go back
| to policyholders, seems not comparable to a for profit
| insurance business, and for this discussion, is not going
| to have a profit margin that results in higher costs to
| policyholders):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellmark_Blue_Cross_Blue_Sh
| iel...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance
|
| >Mind you a few of the "non-profit" BCBS licensees have
| been sued over claims that they ought not be considered
| not-for-profit.
|
| I see no successful lawsuits, though. Still seems like
| Elevance is the only for profit BCBS licensee.
|
| >In 2014, BC/BS of Illinois (Health Care Service
| Corporation) was sued over its nonprofit status. The
| lawsuit was dismissed, with prejudice, and the dismissal
| ruling was upheld on appeal.[62] Similar suits occurred
| with similar results in other states such as Oregon.[63]
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| To be clear if Elevance is the only remaining for-profit
| BCBS licensee it's because they bought the others.
|
| Highmark got labeled as for-profit on its Wikipedia entry
| likely because they own a variety of for-profit companies
| including e.g. Highmark BCBSD Inc. and Celtic Hospice
| LLC.
|
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/
| 453...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| But Highmark, the parent organization, is still a non
| profit. Based on their revenue and expenses on their 990
| going back a decade, the entire organization is not
| delivering profit to any owners, it's just spending money
| earned in its for profit subsidiaries elsewhere in its
| org.
|
| Specifics aside, I think it is conclusively shown that no
| health insurance / managed care organization earns a ton
| of profit margin. No one is going to become billionaire
| rich by starting up a managed care organization, because
| they will spend almost all they earn.
|
| It's such a low profit margin business, that Buffett,
| Dimon, and Bezos abandoned it:
|
| https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/haven-
| disbands-en...
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| But Highmark, the parent organization, is still a non
| profit.
|
| So? The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit but Mozilla
| Corporation is _for_ profit. They 're delivering profit,
| just with an added layer of indirection. In this case the
| Highmark parent is technically a non-profit but e.g.
| Highmark BCBSD, the Delaware arm, is a _for_ profit BCBS
| licensee.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > They're delivering profit
|
| To who? Are there shareholders profiting? Employees on
| the take?
|
| > Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the
| Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct
| Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla
| Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation
| reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla
| projects.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
|
| It's the same with Highmark, assuming there isn't massive
| fraud happening.
| jfengel wrote:
| Part of the problem is that the existence of the middle
| man adds a lot of costs: insurance company salaries,
| their executives, doctor's office billing coding,
| advertising, etc.
|
| The shareholders take home only a fraction. But a lot of
| money gets spent that simply doesn't need to be. Other
| countries avoid the deadweight loss of the middle man.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The genius of the US way is that the politicians avoid
| the heat when healthcare coverage is denied. Whereas UK
| and Canadian politicians have to answer to their
| constituents.
|
| Of course, now that getting murdered is on the table, the
| US health insurance executives might want to up their
| compensation.
| gunian wrote:
| no offence but that murder had nothing to do with what is
| right or caring for the people just a game same reason
| trains got graffiti on them. At most a beautiful lesson
| in the power that comes with controlling the narrative
| gruez wrote:
| > Whereas UK and Canadian politicians have to answer to
| their constituents.
|
| Yeah, and "politicians have to answer to their
| constituents" is how we got the failed insurance markets
| in California and Florida. This thread has now gone full
| circle.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is the problem with conflating insurance and
| subsidy.
|
| To buy votes, politicians sell "insurance", but in
| reality it is a subsidy to a specific group of taxpayers.
|
| When a government directly pays for healthcare, it can't
| be called insurance, and so limits to the subsidy are
| easily attributed to the government leaders.
|
| Whereas, if a government has the population buy
| "insurance" from non governmental entities, then it can
| pretend (for the layperson) that it isn't a government
| subsidy and so the laypeople can blame limits of the
| subsidy on someone else.
|
| Obviously, health insurance in the US is far from health
| insurance and premiums are closer to taxes being paid
| rather than premiums for one's own health risks.
|
| That isn't so true in property and casualty insurance, at
| least not until governments like California step in.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Part of the problem is that the existence of the
| middle man adds a lot of costs: insurance company
| salaries, their executives, doctor 's office billing
| coding, advertising, etc._
|
| that's not a sophisticated analysis. it would be like
| saying mcdonalds is unecessarily expensive because
| executive pay, and cars, and dry cleaning, etc. etc. yet,
| if you tried to found a competitor, you'd have all those
| same expenses. even charities have to pay management.
|
| insurance companies make money because their aggregate
| risk is less than your individual risk, and you really
| don't want your individual risk so you are willing to pay
| them extra, a premium, to get them to shore up your
| downside. After that it's like any other company selling
| any other thing.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Insurance fees are not high because the _insurance_
| companies are making huge profits.
|
| They're high because _providers_ are making huge profits.
|
| Now granted, they may ultimately be the same thing, but
| that's a different discussion [1]
|
| In the context of housing (fires, hurricanes etc)
| insurance is expensive because housing is expensive to
| build.
|
| [1] insurance companies have to invest their income
| somewhere. It makes sense to choose companies will high
| returns. Which includes some health care providers. Which
| can basically change whatever they like because of
| structural reasons that have been well discussed.
| Newlaptop wrote:
| > Insurance fees are not high because the insurance
| companies are making huge profits.
|
| United Healthcare alone made $23,000,000,000 in profit in
| 2023. Health insurance companies have collectively made
| $371 billion in profits since the passage of the
| Affordable Care Act.
|
| Property & Liability insurance (home, car, etc) have
| relatively modest profit margins, but health insurance
| companies absolutely are making huge profits.
| chii wrote:
| > alone made $23,000,000,000 in profit in 2023
|
| why is this number considered huge? What measure are you
| using? These absolute numbers are meaningless, because
| you have to put it into context. That's why profit margin
| is what analysts use, not the absolute number.
|
| If i changed those figures to: they made $77 per person,
| per year in the USA for providing healthcare services,
| does that still seem as big? Or is it now reasonable?
| slaw wrote:
| $23,000,000,000 profit/29 million insured makes $793
| profit per insured person.
| lordnacho wrote:
| That's huge isn't it? $800 bucks in profit per customer?
| What does Apple make? Or Unilever?
| gruez wrote:
| Why compare to Apple, when the healthcare is arguably
| more complex and expensive?
| chii wrote:
| the original OP is claiming that the healthcare industry
| is too profitable. So you have to compare it to something
| to see if it is too profitable.
| gruez wrote:
| Right, but why use Apple ($800 phone every 2-4 years)
| compared to say, an automaker ($40k in depreciation over
| 10 years) or a REIT ($2000 in rent every month)?
| Moreover, why focus on absolute profits? If the
| healthcare industry split into 3 (eg. doctors, dental,
| drugs) but with the same margins, does that mean they're
| suddenly not "too profitable"?
| lordnacho wrote:
| They are just other things people commonly spend money on
| nradov wrote:
| No, UnitedHealth _Group_ made $22B in profit in 2023.
| Only about half of that profit came from the
| UnitedHealthcare insurance business. The other half came
| from the Optum side which is a mix of non-insurance
| stuff. Optum makes huge profits on software: if the
| software business was spun out it would be one of the top
| 20 US tech companies.
|
| https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/investors/financial-
| report...
| bawolff wrote:
| Using absolute numbers here doesn't really make sense.
| 23B sounds big but its impossible to say if its a high or
| low profit margin without context.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It's profit and it's very large.
| gruez wrote:
| That's going to be true for any nation wide insurance
| company.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That's because healthcare is unusually expensive in the
| US, not because insurers' profit margins are unusually
| high.
| harimau777 wrote:
| The profit margin doesn't include things like CEO salary,
| correct? I could see a scenario where the issue is still
| corporate greed just not greed that's measured by profit.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Executive pay is such a tiny fraction that eliminating it
| would be lost in period to period fluctuations.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| All employee compensation, including CEO and board of
| directors, is included in the expenses used to calculate
| profit margin.
|
| Profit margin is all revenue minus all expenses.
| bawolff wrote:
| Isn't that a bit misleading? Salaries wouldn't be
| included, but a lot of compensation at the very high end
| is based on owning stock, and dividends i assume would be
| part of that profit margin.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Compensation, even in the form of equity, has an
| equivalent cash price that is owed at the time it is
| awarded. The receiver has to pay income tax for this
| compensation, even if it is not cash, and the business
| has to record it as an expense.
|
| >and dividends i assume would be part of that profit
| margin.
|
| Dividends and share buybacks are not expenses. They are
| not money spent for the purposes of operating the
| business, they are awards to the shareholders. As such,
| they are not an expense. Dividends and share buybacks
| happen with the profit, so they will never be included in
| expenses used to calculate profit margin.
|
| There are lots of highly qualified people at the SEC and
| FASB working to ensure some semblance of accountability.
| There is a reason why people from all over the world want
| to invest in a developed countries' public equity
| markets, and that is a belief that most of the time, the
| numbers are very close to the truth.
| hbosch wrote:
| >Isn't that a bit misleading?
|
| In practice yes, but technically no. If a "non-profit"
| brings in 100 million dollars, and pays all 100 employees
| a million dollar salary, then that "non-profit" has made
| no profit. But when someone hears that a "non-profit"
| made "100 million" dollars, they think it is some kind of
| scam or something.
| hattmall wrote:
| Health Insurance IS a huge racket. Insurance profits are
| only a small slice. Executive compensation isn't part of
| profits. The profits of the required sole source medical
| supplies company isn't part of insurance profits. The
| contracts, salaries, benefit packages, overpayments, and
| waste of healthcare systems and pharmaceutical companies
| aren't reflected in insurance profits. Just looking at the
| raw profit percentages returned to shareholders is
| absolutely meaningless.
|
| You have to look at the entire healthcare picture and
| realize that insurance is the system driving the exorbitant
| costs. There is no legitimate reason for healthcare prices
| to be so insane.
| chii wrote:
| > There is no legitimate reason for healthcare prices to
| be so insane.
|
| these profit margins are why some people claim that the
| US is actually subsidizing the rest of the world's low
| cost health outcomes.
|
| These companies make money in the US, at high margins,
| which enables them to operate at low margins in other
| more regulated countries.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This might apply to Pharma, which actually operates in
| international markets, but not to US health insurers,
| PBMs, or for-profit Healthcare providers.
| gruez wrote:
| >Health Insurance IS a huge racket. Insurance profits are
| only a small slice. Executive compensation isn't part of
| profits.
|
| "Executive compensation" is even a "smaller slice" than
| profits, orders of magnitude smaller.
| novok wrote:
| Health insurance's issue is probably how it induces pure
| waste everywhere as everyone has to play this dance of ever
| escalating paperwork which consumes a lot of labor. It's
| not profit, it's waste. Same with the ever increasing
| amount of admin. Why is that admin increasing? I estimate
| insurance or requirements created by insurance is part of
| the cause.
|
| There is also a lot of other smells of a lack of a
| competitive market. Very opaque pricing, limits to how many
| hospitals can be opened in a region, needing paperwork to
| push against that limit, limits in residency slots, the
| entire hazing ritual of residency in the first place,
| limits in opening medical schools, ever escalating
| requirements to become a doctor, restrictions against
| doctor owned hospitals or clinics, the fact something like
| an epipen is still not out of patent and not having many
| clones by now, large barriers to make medical devices and
| medications, while simultaneously having great issues with
| generic drug quality, a horrible food system compared to
| Europe, while simultaneously having a much harder
| regulatory state medically compared to europe, etc.
| distortionfield wrote:
| This is spot on. It's not that I think health insurance
| companies are making insane profit margins. It's that
| their very existence in the system is a pure negative and
| in fact a moral blight. Inflicting profit into a system
| that is entirely dedicated to human health is by
| definition a conflict of interest for basically everyone
| involved, even if it operated at a hypothetical 100%
| efficiency.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Lots of things necessary for life are run by for-profit
| businesses -- for example, food production. Do farmers
| have a "conflict of interest"? What about healthcare in
| particular makes profit immoral?
| spease wrote:
| If the grocery store decides to remove the prices from
| everything, and require its shoppers to first call its
| billing department only open until 5pm to receive a set
| of numbers, then call their third party subscription
| service only open until 6pm to receive a non-binding
| estimate, for every item in their grocery list, then wait
| weeks or months for the grocery store to have its
| cashiers take time away from checking customers out to
| petition the third-party subscription service to allow
| its customers to buy any item deemed to require prior
| authorization...
|
| You can typically endure hunger for 15 minutes for the
| time it takes to go to another food store.
|
| On the other hand, if you are bleeding out in the ER, no
| such luxury exists.
|
| Insurance executives have a fiduciary duty to maximize
| the profit of the company.
|
| If the company makes a profit off of treating patients,
| then it has a financial incentive to not approve
| treatments that would make patients better.
|
| If the company loses money treating patients, then it has
| a financial incentive to deny treatment as much as
| possible.
|
| Unless a legal structure is found which scales profit
| with quality of care, ethical choices will be at odds
| with the fiduciary duty of the company officers. Having
| an AI say "no" and putting someone on hold is a lot less
| expensive than paying out for a cure that cost billions
| to develop.
|
| In the case of government-run healthcare, the government
| at least sees the consequence of poor health outcomes in
| decreased productivity, competitiveness, gdp, and/or tax
| revenue, as well as increased use of social services.
|
| In other words, if the insurance company refuses to treat
| you, it costs the government money to pay for welfare
| indefinitely, not the insurance company.
|
| There are lots of perverse incentives at work, and
| vanishingly few people even try to understand them, I
| think because most people simply don't believe it could
| possibly be as bad as it is. And by the time they learn
| otherwise, they care more about getting healthy again
| than overextending themselves trying to solve a massively
| complex problem.
| zie wrote:
| > Insurance executives have a fiduciary duty to maximize
| the profit of the company.
|
| Probably not. Many insurance companies are not "for
| profit" companies(not a 501c3, something else). Certainly
| some are, but most of the giant ones, State Farm, etc are
| not. Most are Mutual Insurance companies:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance which
| handily includes a list of them.
|
| I.e. they are operated more like Vanguard, the investment
| firm than they are Fidelity(a private for profit company)
| or Schwab a public for-profit company.
|
| Also, this fiduciary duty thing is not really true, but
| people think it's true. They do have a duty to work in
| their shareholders best interests. Lately that's been
| taken to mean profit above all else, but that's a
| recent(last few decades) interpretation.
|
| > If the company makes a profit off of treating patients,
| then it has a financial incentive to not approve
| treatments that would make patients better.
|
| It depends on if they share the cost(s) of keeping
| patients healthy or not. Incentives matter. If they are
| incentivized to keep people healthy, instead of just
| treating X disease today, it would be a different
| conversation.
|
| > In other words, if the insurance company refuses to
| treat you, it costs the government money to pay for
| welfare indefinitely, not the insurance company.
|
| > There are lots of perverse incentives at work
|
| Agreed. But mostly it's just excess waste as far as I
| know. I'm not an expert in healthcare, so I'm at best a
| armchair quarterback here.
| SilasX wrote:
| >If the grocery store decides to remove the prices from
| everything, and require its shoppers to first call its
| billing department only open until 5pm to receive a set
| of numbers, then call their third party subscription
| service only open until 6pm to receive a non-binding
| estimate, for every item in their grocery list,
|
| Good point (buying food _would_ be a nightmare if it
| worked like American health care!) but that 's a
| different argument from the one made above in the thread,
| that a profit motive in a vital good inherently creates
| perverse effects.
| titzer wrote:
| Oh yes, these things are _exactly_ equivalent. Problem
| is, nothing about the health system 's incentives aligns
| with consumer benefit. The most profitable outcome for an
| insurer is that everyone pays premiums and never uses any
| services. The most profitable outcome for hospitals is
| that they charge maximum prices for every service and yet
| don't really fix underlying problems or prevent future
| problems. Hospitals profit the most off patients that
| need a ton of care and have deep pockets. They lose money
| on giving care to people who cannot afford it and won't
| pay. They lose money in the long run when preventive care
| prevents later catastrophic (and expensive) conditions
| later. Pretty much all of the profit-maximizing forces in
| the for-profit system are _deeply_ unethical.
|
| If you're going to tell us that because health care
| providers and health insurance companies are some kind of
| magic counterbalance against each other that benefit
| consumers, uh, nope.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Oh yes, these things are exactly equivalent
|
| A: All men are tall, therefore Giannis Antetokounmpo is
| tall.
|
| B: Your proof is wrong: see this man here, he isn't tall!
|
| A: Clearly he has _nothing_ in common with Giannis. He's
| not even in the NBA!
| gruez wrote:
| >Pretty much all of the profit-maximizing forces in the
| for-profit system are deeply unethical.
|
| Are you talking about healthcare specifically or
| businesses in general? AMD wants to make the best CPUs
| for the most amount of money. Is that "unethical"?
| titzer wrote:
| > healthcare specifically
|
| Yes, it is deeply unethical that someone can be
| bankrupted and become homeless because of a treatable
| condition because the "market" has decided a price for
| the service that is astronomical without insurance, while
| at the same time tying insurance to employment, dividing
| up insurance markets, and making coverage subject to
| inscrutable, unappealable decisions made by people
| sitting behind desks in a completely different part of
| the country, while the leadership of said organizations
| and investors make higher profits than ever. It is
| _deeply unethical_ that a CEO can make tens of millions
| of dollars--which for most regular people is several
| lifetimes worth of earnings--in a single year, while
| dealing in a market that regularly denies coverage to
| people who then suffer, are financially ruined, and die.
|
| It's not the same as making a better CPU for more money.
| Not. At. All.
| nickff wrote:
| You can also become homeless because the market has
| decided that rent should cost more than you can afford
| (in a given area). This involves real estate, equity
| investing, home insurance, zoning, housing regulation,
| and banking. Is this equally immoral? How many types of
| business are similarly immoral?
| nickff wrote:
| I don't think health insurance is actually insurance, but
| I have seen little evidence that it has "insane profit
| margins". From what I've read, 'health insurance' has
| middling profit margins relative to other insurance
| specialties; where are you getting that view/data?
| jpalawaga wrote:
| You do realize health insurers have federally mandated caps
| on their profits, which simply incentivizes creative
| accounting to make money in more oblique ways, right?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| 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.
|
| Or they see that as a cute bit of misdirection. Profits are
| capped as a percentage of healthcare costs, sure.
| Healthcare costs are not capped. Drive up the cost of care,
| drive up the profits.
|
| You ever think it's curious that for-profit insurance
| companies pay out 2-3x what Medicare does for the same
| procedures?
| gruez wrote:
| > Or they see that as a cute bit of misdirection. Profits
| are capped as a percentage of healthcare costs, sure.
| [...]
|
| You know what else is "a cute bit of misdirection"?
| Mentioning that profits are capped without mentioning why
| it's that way in the first place.
|
| >You ever think it's curious that for-profit insurance
| companies pay out 2-3x what Medicare does for the same
| procedures?
|
| ...because the government low-balls healthcare providers?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| ...because the government low-balls healthcare providers?
|
| And yet Medicare is widely accepted. Go figure.
| davemp wrote:
| > 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 people.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| I hear the same thing about supermarkets. Their margins
| are razor thin (1-3%), and yet people look at the overall
| profits and complain, ignoring the fact that the company
| had to deploy 50-100 times that capital to make that
| profit.
|
| An alternative is to split these companies into smaller
| companies, which will each have much lower profits but
| also higher costs due to lost efficiencies, but people
| will not be happy with that either.
| gruez wrote:
| >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
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those people are not collecting the profits by moving
| their own money around.
| SilasX wrote:
| >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.
|
| It's not that I don't believe it, it's that this figure is
| completely unrelated to the damage and waste caused by the
| system of healthcare and health insurance we have in the
| US.
|
| I mean, in a system of chattel slavery, you see above-
| normal profits competed away, but that in no way means the
| system isn't exploiting anyone, because that's not how the
| harm shows up! And yet still we'd see that argument get
| batted around in comments like yours:
|
| "No, your owner can't possibly be exploiting you because,
| when you consider your purchase cost, he doesn't _actually_
| make much profit! "
| donavanm wrote:
| > I've been trying to talk to people locally, a place with
| lots of homes built in the woodland-urban interface, about
| the risks
|
| Its not just the insurance costs either. My neighbor is an
| architect who now does planning/consultation with the RFS
| (rural fire service, australia). Its basically de rigueur for
| people to try and avoid or evade fire sensitive planning
| controls. Just the most basic concepts like defensible space,
| eve guards, or nonflammable finishes, let alone adequate on
| site water storage or site access. People are intentionally
| building in bushland because they want to be "in trees",
| unless they block the view of course.
|
| Even if they understand the concepts and remember black
| saturday, or a few years back!, it doesnt apply _to them_.
| Theres no concept of personal risk & consequences, and
| theyre right. They will probably get bailed out by volunteers
| and socialized losses. Just like new developments along
| riverine flood ways.
| rewgs wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why does State Farm in particular have a moral obligation
| to insure you against fire if it's not profitable for them
| to do so?
|
| To pick random examples of unrelated companies, McDonalds
| or SpaceX would also refuse to insure you against fire. Why
| should people hate State Farm for this reason, but not
| McDonalds or SpaceX?
|
| If State Farm didn't exist and the state ran insurance
| instead, and were willing to insure all comers, they'd be
| subsidizing people who can't be insured profitably. That's
| not crazy on its face (the state subsidizes lots of
| different things), but it's at least worth asking why we
| should be paying for people to live in high-fire-risk areas
| rather than any number of other things the state could be
| spending those resources on.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| State Farm notified its customers in August of its non-
| renewal (not cancelling) of policies, plenty of time for
| homeowners to get new policies or fall back to the state
| fund.
|
| And what is fire insurance? Is that something unique to CA?
| refurb wrote:
| My insurance was cancelled but I don't blame the insurer at
| all.
|
| CA regulation basically capped their premium increase and
| my insurer did calculations that said "this is a net
| negative business".
|
| If I had a business making a loss I would get out, so why
| would I blame my insurer for doing the same?
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.cf
| m
|
| 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.
| rented_mule wrote:
| At some level, insurance is about spreading out financial
| risk. Insurance companies would love for every policy to be
| profitable, but if we let it go that far, it's merely a
| savings account with negative interest rates. At another
| level, insurance is about analyzing risk and making it more
| expensive to take bigger risks. Where do we want the tradeoff
| between these things? Whatever we choose, we have to have
| some ability to predict / evaluate risk.
|
| In the face of climate change, places that have been safe for
| a very long time are becoming unsafe. But I don't see a
| reason these shifts won't happen over and over as climate
| change unfolds. It might be worse than mass migrations...
| migrations to locations which later become dangerous, turning
| into recurring mass migrations.
|
| How well can we predict where it will be safe in the coming
| decades and where it won't. Coastal land at or below current
| sea level (plus storm surge) is fairly predictable,
| especially where there isn't the population density (and
| money) to support building sea walls. But with things like
| rivers changing course (e.g.,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsek_River), it might become
| very difficult to predict what's going to be safe down the
| road. Today we talk about things like 100-year flood plains,
| but how will we establish flood probabilities when the river
| that might flood in 10 or 20 years doesn't even exist today?
|
| Are the people who get unlucky with predictions just screwed
| because their home equity is gone? Or are we going to decide
| to shoulder the burden together? We're going to find out a
| lot about humanity, the role of government, etc. as we go
| through all of this.
| snacksmcgee wrote:
| Soon, people will realize that the entire economic system
| that caused climate change in the first place will not save
| us. Once we stop sacrificing our lives in the name of
| Almighty Profit, then maybe we can move forward and come up
| with solutions that aren't just "lol stop living in LA".
| gruez wrote:
| >Soon, people will realize that the entire economic
| system that caused climate change in the first place will
| not save us.
|
| Disagree. "the entire economic system that caused climate
| change in the first place" is also responsible for the
| green transition, including cheap electric cars and
| renewable energy.
|
| >Once we stop sacrificing our lives in the name of
| Almighty Profit, then maybe we can move forward and come
| up with solutions that aren't just "lol stop living in
| LA".
|
| Alright, what's your solution to "the entire economic
| system that caused climate change in the first place"
| that aren't just "lol just stop capitalism"?
| greenavocado wrote:
| The issue is not that people believe that insurance companies
| are not pricing risk correctly. It's that because there is so
| little competition in the market, people are aware that
| insurance companies can charge higher premiums because they
| operate as an oligopoly.
| epistasis wrote:
| Your statements contradict each other, don't they?
|
| In the many many complaints I have heard about the
| insurance industry, nobody has complained about them acting
| as an oligopoly or about a lack of competition.
|
| Further, pricing is extremely regulated in terms of what
| can be factored in, so being an oligopoly doesn't have much
| impact on that.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >Like we see in California, when the government sets a price
| ceiling, insurance companies just leave
|
| Does not answer the question. With no price caps, no one will
| be able to buy insurance even if required by law. So that means
| if you own a house in a risky area, you will be unable to sell
| it and your values will fall. The price caps are to prevent
| that. But to me, there should be big incentives to prevent
| building and re-building in risky areas.
|
| So yes, the world in some areas are uninsurable. And other
| areas are becoming uninsurable.
| gunian wrote:
| Tangential but I have read about propaganda and social
| engineering but seeing human caused fires to control
| migration patterns is a level of diabolical I never thought I
| would live to see but can't blame them if the cheap rent and
| house prices don't do the job gotta do what you gotta do
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Why is the burden on insurance companies to make up for
| individual poor decisions?
|
| In some cases it makes sense to socialise the losses, but I'm
| not convinced this is one of them.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Insurance Companies do need to make a profit and Local,
| State and Fed Gov is allowing building in very risky areas.
| Just look at Florida, that is a very risky area for weather
| and sea rise.
|
| So in reality the burden is falling on Insurance Companies.
| High rates will in a way prevent building in those areas.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > With no price caps, no one will be able to buy insurance
| even if required by law
|
| I very strongly doubt that say Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos
| wouldn't be able to afford market-rate insurance costs. They
| would just choose not to because its too expensive. Which is
| the point of letting the market set the rate
| gordian-mind wrote:
| "With no price caps, no one will be able to buy insurance
| even if required by law."
|
| Burden of proof?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies
| just leave...
|
| > the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida
| coast would be so high that no one could afford to live
| there...
|
| Seems like the result is the same -- people will live there but
| without insurance.
| orange_joe wrote:
| worse, you'll be paying to bail them out in the name of
| solidarity.
| urhmbutwait wrote:
| That's insurance?
|
| Change the euphemism from government to private insurance
| to satisfy capitalism gods and keep their giant foot from
| squishing us... still "on the books" as a co-mingled pool
| of funds to shift around to solve problems.
|
| Aw ...sad... other people exist and need resources too. Not
| just about your first world skin suit playing temp host to
| a run of the mill electromagnetic field effect.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| People choose where they live, and should bear the cost
| relative to the amount of risk they chose to take.
| Government funding is not a magical blanket that somehow
| makes it moral to take from someone who made good
| decisions and give to another who made poor ones.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| The dutch aren't insured against a dike breaking (Which
| has its own history).
|
| But the dikes have been collectively maintained through
| laws and regulation from a local semi-democratic system
| for 800 years (separate from government). It was a
| necessity as 1 delinquent could screw up everything.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
| gruez wrote:
| The point is that the costs (to build the dikes) are
| fully internalized by the people who live there, rather
| than being cross-subsidized by people far away.
| hb-robo wrote:
| I get that we're on a tech forum but the vast, vast
| majority of people in this country don't have the
| financial ability to just move wherever they want. I'm
| not saying that means that Floridians shouldn't worry
| about this, but this bootstraps narrative is ridiculous.
| Everyone here makes substantially more money than the
| average Joe.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| Agreed in general, but is it reasonable to say to people
| living in multi-million dollar houses on some of the
| world's most coveted real estate that they are should
| assume the risks of it? Or move?
| _factor wrote:
| I'm building my next house right on an active volcano.
| Thank you for subsidizing my idiocy. You should see the
| view!
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Not just the rates are managed, but also deductibles. I'd
| gladly have a 5 figure deductble to keep my or miums lower, but
| regulators think this is unfair to some.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Given over half of all households in the country have less
| than $20k in savings I'd say concerns over equality of access
| may be well founded. Edit: No? The poors can go fuck
| themselves? Alright then I guess.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| How does just offering higher deductibles, hurt the
| 'poors'? Nobody said do away with lower deductibles. Are
| you saying they are not sophisticated enough to understand
| a proper deductible for their situation?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| How does offering a deductible ranged well outside what
| the majority of households in the US can actually pay
| hurt anyone? If that isn't self-explanatory I'm not sure
| what to tell you.
| consp wrote:
| Higher deductibles generally lead to a lower overall
| money pool raising overall prices. They allowed that here
| in a far more regulated market and the effect was about
| 4pct higher prizes across the board. Effectively the
| people who cannot afford the higher deductibles are
| subsidizing the ones who can as the end result.
| lmm wrote:
| Don't worry, the California government is responding to that by
| making it illegal to stop offering insurance in the state. That
| will definitely fix the problem.
| owlbite wrote:
| Source? Many companies seem to be stopping offering insurance
| in the state just fine!
|
| The most recent moves seem to be relaxing the pricing rules
| to allow major disaster pricing and recharging reinsurance
| rates in exchange for insurers offering more policies in high
| risk areas.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| https://www.clydeco.com/en/insights/2025/01/california-
| wildf...
|
| > _The Bulletin was issued pursuant to California Insurance
| Code section 675.1(b)(1), which states that an insurer
| "shall not cancel or refuse to renew a policy of
| residential property insurance for a property located in
| any zip code within or adjacent to the fire perimeter, for
| one year after the declaration of a state of emergency . .
| . based solely on the fact that the insured structure is
| located in an area in which a wildfire has occurred."_
| BeetleB wrote:
| I imagine this won't apply if the insurer just leaves the
| state.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Yep. These are terms to operate as an insurance company
| in the state. If you don't want to do that, the rules
| have no bearing on you.
| qeternity wrote:
| Which effectively means that anybody in a less risky area
| of California is just subsidizing those who live in the
| risky areas. Premia across the board will increase as a
| result.
|
| Typical California redistribution...but this is from the
| bottom to the top.
| rcpt wrote:
| Gotta catch up to Florida
| EGreg wrote:
| Can't you say that about any part of LA? Once a fire gets
| going, it grows and can destroy any neighborhood.
|
| Call me crazy but if I was the mayor of LA I'd make them invest
| heavily in PREVENTION. Cameras and drones all over the place in
| the forests, to nip fires in the bud (and carch arsonists). I
| would also make sure that the live video footage would be used
| only for that purpose. It would use AI at the edge to flag
| every fire immediately and alert nearest authorities, and
| otherwise delete footage. There may be other AI at the edge
| uses added later by the regulators but I'd work to put in place
| heavy bars to overcome (eg 70% in a public referendum) before
| they are added.
|
| I would also invest heavily in mobile firefighting tools and
| materials. The firefighters using buckets is pitiful.
|
| But then again, LA hasn't invested in itself for decades. It's
| like the opposite of NYC: rich people don't want to live in
| Downtown LA, they live in the equivalent of our Brooklyn, say
| Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay by the beach.
|
| Because half of downtown looks increasingly more like skid row.
| Signage and streets are something out of the 70s literally. And
| there pretty much hasn't been any new skyscrapers built since
| the 80s. The skyline is stuck in the Arnold Schwarzenegger
| movie era.
|
| I stayed in Freehand hostel which is actually pretty nice, even
| though there's abandoned buildings and homeless all around. I
| met a drunk Andy Dick there by the pool one evening LOL.
|
| And you people from San Francisco -- it ain't much better over
| where you are. I visited Twitter HQ right when Elon took over.
| And let me tell you -- there is a curious juxtaposition of City
| Hall, City Opera, The SF Philharmonic, and the fourth corner of
| that illustrious intersection is... a large abandoned alleyway
| with dumpsters. What? Imagine Lincoln Center in NYC having
| that.
|
| On my show I did a lot of interviews -- with regulators,
| technologists, sociopolitical commentators like Noam Chomsky.
| But one of my most down-to earth interviews was in SF of a
| homeless guy w his dog. See it for yourself what I'm talking
| about:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqjFeaDLuYQ
|
| PS: _to the silent downvoters... normally I don't mind but this
| time you're just doing it out of spite. Watch the video or say
| something. I bet you live there and don't want to have these
| things pointed out. SF and LA were so great... so many
| movements started there. Lately people are fleeing and the
| homelessness is out of control._
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| 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
| EGreg wrote:
| 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 around it. We have courthouses and government
| buildings.
|
| Certainly none around Lincoln Center which has the
| Metropolitan Opera and NYC Ballet and Philharmonic. It
| doesn't smell there. There are beautiful fountains etc.
|
| I took some photos of the homeless in SF juxtaposed in
| front of the skyline in the background. It is very
| pervasive there. LA and SF seem to be magnets for homeless.
|
| If I was mayor I'd give them all a $50 phone preloaded with
| gigs including ones from the city, like sweeping the
| streets and from businesses such as handing out flyers.
| Have the app unlock mini storage and showers, and help them
| have digital ID. This ain't rocket science. Crowdfund the
| support for each homeless the way we support kids in Haiti.
| Give them opportunities. But instead the bureaucracy just
| kicks them around and denies them opportunities without an
| address.
|
| Anyway...
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| 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
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_New_York
|
| https://www.sf.gov/data/homeless-population
| rafram wrote:
| > Call me crazy but if I was the mayor of LA I'd make them
| invest heavily in PREVENTION. Cameras and drones all over the
| place in the forests, to nip fires in the bud (and carch
| arsonists).
|
| This is a terrible way to deal with fire. The issue isn't
| preventing fires from starting at all, because small fires
| are all over the place. A dropped cigarette can light a city
| block on fire if the wind is just right. The issue is
| preventing spread, and taking precautions when conditions
| (like wind) are conducive to rapid spread.
| EGreg wrote:
| And those precautions are... putting out the fire before it
| spreads, right?
| dboreham wrote:
| That's not how these fires work. Wind and dry fuels mean
| they can't be put out by the time they've been identified
| and someone has verified they're not some dude burning
| trash. Drone armies can't carry enough water.
| rafram wrote:
| No. Forest fires should be allowed to spread to prevent
| fuel buildup. It's bad when they cross into developed
| areas, though, so you want to prevent that.
|
| If anyone ever implements your drone-based surveillance-
| state wildland fire suppression system, please let me
| know so I can avoid hiking in the area.
| EGreg wrote:
| That seems incredibly dangerous. As you said the wind can
| pick them up and cause an inferno.
|
| If you want to do controlled fires IN ADDITION to the
| fire suppression system, you can. If fires are the only
| way to neutralize the fuel, at least control them, and
| don't allow any uncontrolled fire to spread and get out
| of hand. The controlled burns would be planned in
| advance, done on good days and isolated from spreading
| too far. Of course those burns would be excluded from the
| fire suppression system.
|
| But it seems reckless to just "let the fires spread". You
| need actual control over fires if you want to have any
| chance of avoiding disasters.
|
| Imagine you did this in any other area where you're in
| charge of a system. For example you run a forum and
| refuse to implement any sort of moderation or spam
| control. You claim we shouldn't put anything in place to
| clamp down on it and need to let things run their course
| naturally, because sometimes risking spam is necessary to
| get really good updates about stuff by experts. The
| proper thing to do, then, is to intercept spam from
| spreading as much as possible but then carve out a
| whitelist of exceptions. Not to simply not have an anti-
| spam system at all.
| rafram wrote:
| Well, a lot of people at the Forest Service and other
| land management agencies used to think like you do. We
| focused on full suppression throughout the 20th century.
| Now, when a forest fire does start, it isn't controllable
| like it used to be. There's too much fuel lying around
| that we prevented from burning for over a century.
|
| Prescribed burns make sense in certain high-risk areas,
| but there's no substitute for actual, natural forest
| fires. We can never artificially cover the same kind of
| area that a natural fire can cover.
|
| > For example you run a forum and refuse to implement any
| sort of moderation or spam control. You claim we
| shouldn't put anything in place to clamp down on it and
| need to let things run their course naturally, because
| sometimes risking spam is necessary to get really good
| updates about stuff by experts.
|
| That analogy has absolutely no bearing on anything we're
| discussing. Online forums and human behavior aren't a
| good analogue for forests and forces of nature.
| nullc wrote:
| > the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida
| coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there
|
| I'm not so sure. The Pacific Palisades have astronomical real
| estate prices. (actually costly property in Florida isn't cheap
| either). I think the insurance costs would come out of the
| property prices.
|
| I say this on the basis that the prices the real estate sells
| for is already what the market will tolerate, if there are
| other costs to owning it-- then the remaining part the market
| will tolerate will be less.
|
| Perhaps a result of this is that it may only be realistic to
| construct lower costs 'disposable' cabins in areas with higher
| disaster risk... if so, that wouldn't sound like an
| unreasonable way to allocate resources.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| > Is that a bad thing?
|
| Is it a bad thing that we should consider most of the planet
| unlivable because disasters happen that aren't eternally and
| increasingly profitable to insure?
|
| Is it a bad thing that literally tens of millions of Americans
| would no longer have insurance? That you're asking double digit
| percents of the entire population to leave cities and just...
| what? Suddenly have new homes in a region with plentiful
| resources and access to water and food and an economy and no
| disaster potential?
|
| Is it a bad thing to compare entire states to missile testing
| grounds?
|
| Is this satire?
| rcpt wrote:
| Most of the populated areas are perfectly safe from fire.
|
| https://wildfiretaskforce.org/updated-fire-hazard-
| severity-z...
| loeg wrote:
| > Same in Florida.
|
| The Florida situation is actually markedly different. The main
| problem was extreme litigation-friendliness. Florida saw 80% of
| the nation's insurance lawsuits but only ~8% of the insurance
| business. They've also since passed some reforms (HB 837, 2023;
| SB 2-A, 2022).
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think apt comparison would be collision coverage. How much
| would you charge from someone that collides a car each year.
| Probably more than cost of those collisions on average.
| bytwhytyte wrote:
| Let's not forget insurance company greed. They are traded on
| the stock market and must provide returns to their investors.
| Let's not pretend they are not also part of the problem. Same
| with health insurance, it should never be for-profit, IMHO.
|
| But I do agree they should be able to set the premiums,
| otherwise they just go bankrupt. People should not live in
| idiotically constructed neighborhoods in danger zones if they
| can't afford it. But they shouldn't be gouged.
| frinxor wrote:
| Insurance companies are for profit. They run the analysis of
| how much they need to charge to break even, and aim to charge
| above that. If they charge too high, customers will look at
| the alternatives and switch to a competitor.
|
| You can replace "insurance" with any other business, the
| whole of capitalism is built upon this. Every stock on the
| stock market is trying to "provide returns to their
| investors" - each one is as guilty as the next - theres
| nothing special about insurance companies.
|
| If the argument is that insurance should be a federally
| provided service, then we must have a different conversation.
| Look at the FAIR plan. They are government created, and will
| get wiped out because of these fires, possibly because they
| weren't charging enough to begin with (and taxpayers will now
| need to bail them out). The math doesn't change whether its
| state backed or privately backed. If a home, on average, gets
| burned down every X years, then the insurance premium needs
| to be adjusted to be able to cover that.
|
| And here is the crux of the problem - if you take away the
| free market aspect of being able to adjust prices, and get
| forced to sell a product/service for less than what you need
| to, there will be a loss somewhere, in this order of
| operations:
|
| 1. loss at the insurance company --> insurance company goes
| broke or leaves the state
|
| 2. loss at the FAIR plan --> FAIR plan reserves get wiped out
|
| 3. loss at the state level --> taxpayers need to bail the
| situation out.
|
| Id argue that letting the free market work (at layer 1 above)
| is the proper way about it. If a house burns down every 10
| years, let insurance charge 10% of that cost, because that is
| the actual risk involved in the system. House prices will
| naturally come down to reflect that reality of risk.
| stkdump wrote:
| This logic makes absolutely zero sense. If a house is
| uninsurable, people will choose to live there without
| insurance. But if the house is insurable for a high cost people
| will not? They can still choose to not buy the expensive
| insurable and be in the same boat as inunsurable home owners.
| e44858 wrote:
| Will banks give out loans for houses without insurance?
| ikrenji wrote:
| why not have a 100 feet buffer clear of vegetation around
| housing? seems like an easy fix.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The governments know this and yet set the insurance premium
| price ceilings anyways.
|
| At some point you have to consider that as indistinguishable
| from having a policy to drive people out: deny them insurance,
| wait for natural disaster, redevelop the now-very-cheap land
| however the government and its developer friends wants. Whether
| such a policy is adopted on purpose may not be possible to
| tell. You'll get called a conspiracist if you even hint that
| you wonder about it. But you know these people know -it's hard
| to believe that they don't- what happens when you set price
| ceilings.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Its interesting because the last 5 years in the US have seen a
| dramatic appreciation in housing prices, and also a seeming
| rise of risk of catastrophic events, and insurance companies
| are grappling with these 2 things. Ultimately maybe different
| insurance products could be provided that effectively offload
| some or all of the risk to the home buyer(which obviously is a
| not a good scenario for banks giving mortgages).
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| So let me try to put the author's argument in order:
|
| (1) The author tried to get homeowner's insurance, but was denied
| because their home was a significant hurricane risk
|
| (2) The author (maybe?) got insurance through a state-run FAIR
| program, but then cites news reports that these programs are
| close to insolvency (As are a significant amount of non-state-run
| homeowner insurance programs).
|
| (3) The author is like, "well, if it's so hard to insure my
| house, maybe I should think about living somewhere else." And
| then generalizes to "a lot of places should be uninsurable and
| uninhabited - apocalypse here we come"
| winux-arch wrote:
| Makes sense to me. Good comprehension
| api_or_ipa wrote:
| Every era has it's Malthusian alarmists and without fail, each
| has been proven wrong by exactly the same thing the author
| decries and says won't work this time: technological change and
| adaption. There's no reason to think this time will be any
| different. Will some places become uninsurable? Sure, plenty of
| places over time have become uninsurable. Will the whole world
| became uninsurable? Absolutely not, because we are quite good at
| adaptation in the face of adversity.
|
| The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's
| availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that
| are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly
| priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas
| and into areas with far less chance to burn.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You can't live in places where your home is going to get
| destroyed every couple of decades by wildfires, floods, or
| hurricanes. There are more of these places now because of
| climate change and a lot of people are going to have to migrate
| over the next century, like huge global migrations. Insurance
| can't/won't allow a bunch of people to deny this reality any
| more (or at least much longer). LA is going to be pretty
| uninsurable unless the local governments do a lot to mitigate
| the fire risk.
| tptacek wrote:
| You can; it's just expensive.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| So is living on the sea bed. It's _irrationally_ expensive
| and inconvenient, which is why we don 't do it.
|
| Living in areas in constant danger of flooding and/or
| burning and/or storm wind damage and/or drought seems like
| quite an eccentrically inconvenient lifestyle flex.
|
| Unless you like disaster movies.
| achierius wrote:
| Where are you suggesting we live then? Most all of the US
| is at "constant" risk for at least one kind of disaster
| in your list or another.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Far enough inland that the rising sea levels will keep
| you 50 miles away from the coast for the next century
| anywhere east of a north-south line that runs through the
| middle of Kansas. These are places where it rains so you
| have local water supply and you don't have a yearly
| wildfire season and the risk of hurricane destruction is
| far lower. Also just not in the floodplain of a local
| river.
|
| This is like half of the country.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I can tell you home insurance is climbing in the Midwest
| from storms (roofs are apparently expensive to
| replace/service). I pay more in Nebraska than I did in
| California (although to be fair, I did not buy earthquake
| insurance in CA).
| teractiveodular wrote:
| As the 173 million strong population of Bangladesh can
| attest, they can and do live in such places.
|
| _" Each year, on average, 31,000 square kilometres (12,000
| sq mi) (around 21% of the country) is flooded. During severe
| floods the affected area may exceed two-thirds of the
| country, as was seen in 1998."_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floods_in_Bangladesh
|
| Most of the world does not want to aspire to be Bangladesh,
| but humans have been living in extremely disaster-prone areas
| for millennia because the short-term benefits (rich soil etc)
| outweigh the occasional catastrophic losses.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Another example: Japan has many quakes per year and has a
| strangely high percentage of the world's active volcanos.
| People have lived there for a very long time, built to
| accommodate it (both traditionally, using timber and
| expecting to rebuild often, or with modern earthquake-
| hardened architecture), and is now a top five economy by
| GDP.
|
| And, well, most of the US is just a hanger-on to
| California's economy.
| trescenzi wrote:
| > In 2023, California's gross domestic product (GDP) was
| about $3.9 trillion, comprising 14% of national GDP
| ($27.7 trillion). Texas and New York are the next largest
| state economies, at 9% and 8%, respectively.[1]
|
| CA is a huge economy but by no means is the US just CA +
| 49 other states. Might be fairer to say it's CA+NY+TX+FL
| but at that point you're just aggregating the population.
|
| [1]:https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-economy/
| daedrdev wrote:
| The cost of labor is extremely high in the US compared to
| Bangladesh, and that along with building standards, minimum
| lot size, minimum floor space requirements and required low
| density zoning (lmao) make these two case very different
| HPsquared wrote:
| What does it mean when a whole country has expensive
| labour? The highly-paid people of said country can afford
| each others' services. It basically means "low cost of
| materials" from a human perspective.
| jart wrote:
| Yes and before they migrate due to climate change, they'll
| sell their charred lots to some fascist with the willpower to
| clear the brush, fill the reservoirs, and deploy fire
| fighting drones. Then everything will go back to normal. God
| protects only the strong.
| nradov wrote:
| It's always amazing and disappointing to see how many people
| actually believe that prices can be lowered by legislative
| fiat, or that "price gouging" is an actual thing that happens.
| I guess they would prefer to have shortages instead of paying
| market rates, and then complain about "greedy big business" or
| (my favorite) "late stage capitalism".
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| People who buy health care in the US already get de facto
| shortages (from denied coverage) and inflated market rates.
|
| Other kinds of insurance are no different.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Which is nice.
|
| But important, useful things will still be burning and
| flooding, at huge cost to the economy. Which is less nice.
|
| At this point I think we've tipped into a world of complete
| delusion, where imaginary "markets" are more important than
| keeping the planet comfortable, stable, and inhabitable.
|
| Also. this, from that most volatile, irrational, and least
| sensible of all professions - the actuaries:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/economic...
| davidw wrote:
| I think what I worry about is large-scale migrations of people
| to 'better' areas and the problems that's going to cause.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Let alone migrations for other reasons, e.g. moving to states
| with better human rights or work availability.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| In the past, the Krakatoa eruption messed with the climate
| around the world and made the sky dark. The Bronze Age Collapse
| is something we still don't understand but nearly wiped out
| everything in the western world. With population density higher
| than ever, disasters that match major historical ones would be
| far more destructive. It's really just been an unusually
| peaceful few decades in first world countries and people have
| gotten too comfortable.
| Daz1 wrote:
| >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
| curious.
|
| Meanwhile the impending global famine(s) - (plural) of the
| 20th century never came to be because captitalism kept
| pumping out agriscience improvements to improve crop yields
| to 10 times what they were in 1900.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| ???
|
| 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 is just tools that humans make to solve a
| problem.[1] It's not magic. And in the case of the Japanese
| tsunami, the most basic technology that humans have had for
| tens of thousands of years saved countless lives: just
| building a wall, and making it tall enough to block rising
| water. [2] But wrapping an entire country in walls is kind
| of unfeasible. And you can't protect the entire world. We
| never know what kind of disaster will strike next, and
| technology to protect us only develops after we suffer the
| consequences at least once.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology#Prehistoric
|
| [2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/photo-essay-the-seawalls-
| of-toh...
| fsloth wrote:
| > 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 been
| historically) knowledge transfer and preservation was
| based on human to human contact. You could not literally
| just crank the machine to print out out going edges in a
| knowledge graph.
|
| I'm not meaning just a few literate people. I mean an
| entire society capable of reading and eager to create and
| learn new information.
|
| > Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a
| problem.
|
| According to a dictionary it's "the branch of knowledge
| dealing with engineering or applied sciences" / "the
| application of scientific knowledge for practical
| purposes, especially in industry" and I would argue it's
| this sort of technology that enables novel, rapid
| adaptation.
|
| Applied sciences need science before application. Now -
| knowledge seeking that sure looks likes science even
| though it was not called that has been around few
| millenia - Thales of Miletus, Ibn al-Haytham etc etc.
|
| What is novel in our time is application of science _to
| every goddamn problem_ on an industrial scale. And the
| understanding that things can improve. This requires a
| literate society (imo but arguable maybe), eager to
| adapt, and pragmatic recognition of what works and what
| does not.
|
| There are areas that are lacking in literacy and capital.
| While people in those areas sure enough are able as
| anybody else to individually use technology developed and
| manufactured elsewhere, the societies in which they live
| simply lack the means to apply industrial level
| technological innovations.
|
| With industrial level technology adaptation it's a whole
| different ballgame.
|
| Many places in US would be uninhabitable without
| technology and are thus testaments to the idea that
| MODERN technology allows survival in unprecedented
| places. For example Colorado. The place was so arid and
| unhospitable no one could or would want to live there.
| But then there came railroads, industrial engineering to
| implement water reservoirs etc etc and visit Denver today
| and it's very hard for an outsider to realize they are
| visiting a modern goddamn miracle.
|
| I'm fairly sure if people can live in Colorado they can
| live anywhere given sufficient capital is applied
| (capital being the enabler of applied science and
| technology).
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| 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".
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_Verde_National_Park
| fsloth wrote:
| I agree humans as individuals regadless where they came
| from or when they lived have always been equally precious
| in potential, and all traditions are valuable, but it's
| simply false narrative to claim modern technology &
| capital would not make a difference.
|
| My point was it's false narrative to compare any
| historical society to a modern industrial one.
|
| Printing press, latin alphabet and market economy were
| suberb for knowledge transfer. There was no historically
| comparable system to commodotize and scale literacy.
|
| It's false narrative to claim european developments were
| not unique and transformative. That's just how the
| history goes. Literacy, capital, binding contract law and
| science created a heady mix that created a system that
| now is global standard how societies try to operate.
|
| Large parts of the system came from other parts of the
| world. The point is not where this happened or by whom,
| but the point is it happened.
|
| Modern technological societies are able to adapt in
| unprecedented scale. Regardless of culture or ethnicity.
|
| It would be pretty weird to think this would be a
| narrative of european supremacy - cultural, racial or
| otherwise. Europe was an inconsequential periphery and
| it's once again an iconsequential periphery.
| forgotoldacc wrote:
| Japan had literacy rates equal to the west during the age
| of exploration. [1] And when you go back to historical
| records, Egypt and Mesopotamia had insane good record
| keeping and were stabler, longer lasting societies than
| anything else earth has yet seen. They're also in some
| notably harsh environments compared to the easy living of
| Europe.
|
| Latin characters really had nothing to do with it.
| Western society was built off the lessons learned from
| those two societies. What separates post-printing press
| western civilization has been the incredibly rapid
| expansion (which Mongols also achieved with nothing but
| horses and bows and arrows). But whether this post-
| printing press civilization will last as long as Ancient
| Egypt did (3000 years) is yet to be seen. We've got about
| 2600 years to go.
|
| [1] https://www.jef.or.jp/journal/pdf/unknown_0003.pdf
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would argue that Egypt apart from temperature was lot
| less harsh than Europe. Nile offers water all through the
| year. And the flooding brought fertilizer each year. Also
| lot less risk of any type of weather causing famine.
|
| In reality that is lot less harsh than Europe before
| industrial agriculture. Just looking at list of famines
| shows that Europe was a harsh place to live for stable
| society.
| fsloth wrote:
| It's also very hard to compare pharaonic Egypt to a
| modern society since most people were agricultural
| labourers. You did have not that many people (lets say 3M
| which was a lot by ancient standards), and of the elite
| who actually could use capital and talent were really,
| really scarce. Literacy rates were maybe 1%-15%?
|
| Think what a modern country would look like with 3M
| people of which 150K can read. It would not be pretty and
| Egypt was probably worse. Of course if you can control
| thousands of people you always have some capabilities
| which is the reason why we adore their art to this day.
| But I think one should think "North Korea" what pharaonic
| egypt likely was like rather than "pinnacle of imaginable
| civilization". This is not to put down the achievements
| of the egyptian civilization, but like pointed out, they
| had lots of time.
|
| Most people _anywhere_ (except the pastoralists ofc) were
| agricultural labourers before modern farming kicked in.
| fsloth wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| What makes the capabilities of the current civilization
| different is a _combination_ of things, some of which are
| unique this time around.
|
| The major differentiators are 1. Global scale monoculture
| in knowledge (take engineers from US midwest, Ethiopia,
| China, Brazil, France, Japan, Finland, Chennai - we all
| basically can mesh instantly to a product team since
| tehcnological education is so homogenous). This
| monoculture was enabled by the printing press and later
| digital technologies. 2. Insane amount of energy per
| capita available 3. Amount of capital available including
| finance
|
| 2. and 3. simply were not available before. We can argue
| all day about merits of education systems of old but you
| simply did not have this global talent mass on hand. This
| talent mass is prerequisite so that you can scale capital
| and technology rapidly on a global scale.
|
| Energy&Capital then feed the machine to give it energy.
| This machine simply did not exist before. The energy per
| person in any society was tiny fraction what we can
| utilize. Similarly for capital.
|
| Japan is excellent example.
|
| a) It demonstrates how long it takes for a society, if
| it's educated and all around excellent _but pre-modern_
| to reach parity with modern societies. I would argue
| based on facts it 's about two generations or 50 years
| (for Japan) from Perry expedition 1850's to Japan wiping
| a western industrial nation state fleet to the bottom of
| the Tsushima straits (1905).
|
| b) It demonstrates this society, when in it's pre-modern
| configuration lacked things, that it felt necesary to
| acquire to be able to go head-to-head with societies that
| had these implemented.
|
| It's this difference between pre-modern,pre-capitalist
| pre-industrial and modern I'm talking about, why it's
| false narrative to state "people througout history have
| been smart and able" as a contradiction why modern
| societies would be more capable. Because they are. It's
| not a statement about why some people with different
| upbringing or genes would be different. That's irrelevant
| (except up to a point where their upbringing relates to
| prevalent institutions i.e Acemoglu, "Why nations fail"
| etc).
|
| I agree we know nothing of _how long_ the current system
| can last, or will it evolve or devolve. But it 's very
| hard for me to imagine the system going away unless we go
| full mad max. Because it's not about cultural identity
| anymore. Who is your king or god. While we live in
| tumultuous times, Fukuyama was still more or less correct
| IMO, even though clearly it's not a "end of history" as
| much as "beginning of new history".
|
| It's about capital, energy, education and markets.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| > Daz1: Conveniently you selected pre-technology
| examples. How curious.
|
| > forgotoldacc: Technology has been around for hundreds
| of thousands of years. What are you defining as
| "technology"?
|
| I think he meant "industrial".
| Sabinus wrote:
| Technology can't save you from famines when there isn't
| enough sunlight to grow crops for a season or two. One
| _good_ supervolcano and civilization might collapse or at
| least take such a hit as to be utterly transformed.
| Billions dead, etc.
| lazide wrote:
| Literally grow lights and nuclear reactors? (Or plain old
| gas turbine generators)
|
| Technology is the _only thing_ that can save anyone from
| that type of situation. Prayer sure wouldn't help!
| Sabinus wrote:
| You think it's possible to put any decent percentage of
| our GLOBAL food production in greenhouses (remember with
| less light global temperatures go down) within ~6 months?
|
| Billions would perish. If the luckier rich countries did
| not get nuked or invaded by armies or waves of endless
| starving refugees then they would be able to save a good
| amount of their population. At best world development
| goes back ~50-100 years. At worst, modern civilization
| basically ends from the combination of conflict and
| famine.
| lazide wrote:
| that doesn't address the context of the response at all.
|
| is technology helping, or hurting in that situation?
|
| near as i can tell, it is the only thing that _could_
| help.
|
| we aso have significant food stores and buffers, and if
| it was the situation you described it would literally be
| a 'drop everything and get working' emergency. we'd
| likely do better than you expect.
|
| what else could possibly help besides technology?
|
| But yes, a lot of people would die.
| Daishiman wrote:
| You don't have the _slightest_ idea of how much energy
| and materials you would need to provide sufficient grow
| lights to feed humanity right?
| lazide wrote:
| Sure I do. Do you have anything else you can propose that
| would help at all?
|
| And if a couple billion people (minimum) would be dead if
| we didn't do it ASAP, do you think that energy or
| material wouldn't be expended at the drop of a hat?
|
| Hell, look at how much energy we expend just to serve
| _cat videos_.
|
| People generally respond to sudden, external, visible
| risks pretty well.
|
| It's when risks are hidden, build slowly, or are caused
| by behaviors they consider 'unsolvable' and they've
| learned to adapt to that they suck.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Serving cat videos is about at least three orders of
| magnitude less energy than required to grow food. How
| much energy do you think you need to light half a hectare
| with 1 kWh LED lamps?
| lazide wrote:
| Depending on a bunch of factors
|
| [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0
| 9601....]
|
| [https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/how-much-energy-does-it-
| take-t...]
|
| But let's say we take the upper end of energy consumption
| multiples between input energy and output energy (kcal),
| say 120 times. So to feed 1 person 2000 kcal per day,
| would require 240,000 kcal worth of 'production' energy,
| which at that multiple would add up to 278 kWh per day
| per person. Signifiant!
|
| Multiply that by the population of the US (345 million),
| and that is a lot of kWh for sure - 95910000000 kWh. But
| it looks like national energy usage is measured in
| 'quads'. And that is .3 quads per day.
|
| Current US energy production is approximately 100 quads
| per year, and consumption a bit less than that at around
| 90 something.
|
| [https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/]
|
| So if we picked the absolute least efficient most energy
| consuming plants, and grew them in the least efficient
| type of growing environment, we'd need to drop everything
| and devote all our energy production to it.
|
| Assuming no rationing, no efficiency improvements (LED
| lights are quite efficient now, and if we really had this
| issue we'd of course devote 100% of available production
| to them!), and no bulk commercial production of simpler
| foodstuffs (we can make bulk sugars and proteins via
| bioreactors right now, for instance), it would be
| terrible but possible. At least for the US.
|
| Countries with more solar production, or colder, would be
| harder hit of course.
|
| China would be well positioned probably to pivot, and I'd
| be surprised if they didn't use it to their advantage.
| Especially with turning up their nukes and pivoting all
| their solar plants to making LEDs instead.
|
| India and Bangladesh would be _really_ screwed though.
|
| Everyone would finally think farming was cool again
| though, so that's a plus.
| Daishiman wrote:
| I take it you never bought LED panels for indoor grow ops
| right? Never considered the cost and resources required
| for the wiring, installation, programming, making
| greenhouses in the span of a year? Do you know how much
| copper you need per capita? The bottlenecks in
| manufacturing? This is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| One thing worth noting about these agriscience improvements
| you're touting would be they require a combination of non-
| renewable inputs and unsustainable amounts of water. There
| is also the minor issue of unrecoverable topsoil depletion
| and the steady decline of nutrients in agricultural
| products tracked over decades. Kicking the can down the
| road isn't the same as solving the problem.
| rewgs wrote:
| You selected pre-climate change examples. How curious.
| adrianN wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| > "we are quite good at adaptation in the face of adversity."
|
| Historically, much of this "adaptation" was achieved via
| migration. If your vision for the future includes mass
| migration away from the equator into the cooler north, then
| okay, we are on the same page as to one of the plausible
| outcomes.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| ? Have you opened a history book? The whole pre-WW2 situation
| was a malthusian trap. The colonial empires starved out whole
| continents on the periphery of their empires. Thats how japan
| and germany turned to hyper-imperialism in the first place.
|
| And the solution of turning gas into fertilizer requires a free
| trade system to be reliable.
| locallost wrote:
| This is the same logic that almost destroyed the financial
| system in 2008. "House prices always go up, and there is no
| reason to think this time will be different". Fine logic that
| works until it doesn't.
|
| At best your logic works because people get concerned, and work
| to solve the problem. Once there is a critical mass of people
| unconcerned, like yourself, that think we will magically adapt
| and solve the problem, we're screwed.
| billfor wrote:
| So we can have 1 trillion people, 2 trillion, there's no upper
| limit?
| amazingamazing wrote:
| my sadly hot (no pun intended) take is that insurance needs to be
| let free. price controls on insurance are doubly
| counterproductive - not only does it result in the companies
| leaving, it results in those who need the insurance losing their
| stuff when catastrophe inevitably hits.
|
| it's ok if insurance is expensive - let it result in the insured
| goods or services having a serious price adjustment.
|
| rather than price controls a slightly better solution would be
| just to nationalize insurance and force everyone to use it, but
| even that is not really a solution since highly correlated events
| are the antithesis of insurance.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think this is a pretty common and au courant take right now.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Agreed. The government should ensure fair prices by ensuring
| healthy competition. Maybe have a (non-subsidized) public
| option. The government should also compensate for the power
| disparity by requiring policies to have reasonable coverage and
| making sure insurance companies actually honor them when the
| times comes. But directly dictating a maximum price isn't going
| to go well.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Totally agree, though there should still be insurance
| commisions and controls to ensure that any company selling
| policies in a given area is solvent enough to pay out.
| Otherwise you'll have fly-by-night insurance companies selling
| sham policies for cheap then folding up shop during the next
| natural disaster saying "oopsies guess it's the state's
| responsibility now".
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This is not an insurance problem, or a market problem, or an
| MBA econ problem.
|
| It's a "Do we want cultural extinction or a relatively
| comfortable and habitable planet?" problem, which is not quite
| the same thing.
|
| No amount of faith-based "We will adapt!" is going to make an
| impression until evidence appears that we are actually adapting
| in real, tangible ways.
|
| Clearly, objectively, and empirically we are not. We are doing
| the opposite - pretending to ourselves the problem is going to
| be solved by continuing with the same mistakes which caused it.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| i unironically believe the insurance is a great signal for
| pricing externalities. if you want, imo, a comfortable
| planet, you should want everyone to have to pay, out of
| pocket, for the risk they're taking.
|
| the result would be people not living in areas that a risky,
| engaging in behaviors or risking, or partaking in things the
| contribute to the world becoming more volatile.
| noirbot wrote:
| But isn't the issue that I may have been living in an area
| for decades and because the government didn't correctly
| price/deter externalities, now I can't afford to live
| somewhere? The companies lobbying for the abilities to
| pollute and otherwise add risk to the world can afford to
| pay the higher insurance rates. The folks who live in the
| areas they put at risk often can't.
|
| Insurance costs rising are a good signal, but they're
| essentially a way to tax normal people for the faults of
| governments and major companies. It does reflect the real
| risk, but it's not like the fact of people living in most
| of these areas is the reason the area is risky.
| Sabinus wrote:
| >they're essentially a way to tax normal people for the
| faults of governments and major companies
|
| But it's a great way to deliver the signal that
| '(Climate) RISK IS INCREASING' directly to the voters. If
| the government socialises the losses, society won't learn
| the harsh lessons about our changing world quickly
| enough.
| noirbot wrote:
| Maybe, but these subsidies to insurance are the result of
| voters complaining! The folks they complained to just
| took the easy way out and instead of annoying powerful
| entities and forcing them to treat the climate better,
| they just messed up the insurance market and spread the
| risk around.
|
| The same people who have the power to fix it always have
| and they've almost always taken the easy way out. The few
| times anyone's tried to do real changes on these issues,
| the other externalities of the changes has usually led to
| voters rejecting them.
| derf_ wrote:
| _> it's ok if insurance is expensive - let it result in the
| insured goods or services having a serious price adjustment._
|
| Long term, sure. In the short term, the rapid rise of housing
| prices combined with the increased rates and severity of
| disasters means the extra monthly cost would be enough to price
| a number of people out of homes they purchased when rates were
| much lower. While it's easy to say, "They should just move,"
| that has huge transaction costs. Aside from the obvious things,
| which are already substantial, consider the cost of paying off
| a mortgage taken out a few years ago and acquiring a new
| mortgage at current interest rates. That can cost you hundreds
| of thousands of dollars (which shows up as now only being able
| to afford a much worse house, probably in a much worse
| location, if you can continue to afford to own at all), and you
| are basically gifting that money to the bank by paying off your
| loan early.
|
| You can understand why such people would be willing to take a
| chance on not having insurance rather than incur a definite
| loss, and why it might be tempting to try to come up with some
| other solution than just unleashing the unrelenting might of
| the free market on them.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| One thing I am mostly against is nationalized property/casualty
| insurance. California seems to have taken every opportunity to
| not properly price risk. My worry is that while extreme, their
| logic and priorities do not feel unique for government decision
| making. The last thing I'd want to do is expand it.
|
| When you distort risk pricing, you distort the market, and if
| you do it hard enough for long enough, you are basically
| pulling back the slingshot.
|
| While this also applies to mutual insurers, my philosophy is
| being serious about solvency is the best way to know if you are
| properly underwriting and pricing. I feel like the government
| operates too much knowing that they can backstop it either
| themselves or by imposing an assessment on the market.
|
| You are right that the really big disasters are very correlated
| events. While not a silver bullet, reinsurance and other risk
| transfer stuff can help smooth those kind of events out. The
| good-ish thing with those risks is that while they are
| uncertain, they are sort of identifiable, known unknowns in
| Rumsfeld parlance.
|
| I agree with that sentiment, the thing that always seems crazy
| to me is that California's housing pricing in the face of all
| these things, but perhaps it's sort of pick your poison. Like I
| don't want to harp on it, but the only implicit or explicit
| thing everyone appears to agree on given the decisions that
| have been made is protecting housing prices above all else. But
| don't expose people to the ramifications of the housing
| appreciation (Looking at you, Prop 13).
| naming_the_user wrote:
| To me this sort of thing just seems like a weird financialization
| brain disease of sorts.
|
| At the end of the day if your house burns down you can go and get
| some wood / stone / whatever and build one somewhere else and
| this will basically always be possible to do to some degree.
|
| The question is just about what the chance of having to do that
| per year is and what that represents in dollar value. It can't
| not be possible.
| greenthrow wrote:
| An hour in and nobody in these comments is addressing climate
| change? The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes
| and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history in
| these areas because of climate change. Should people be forced to
| abandon their homes because the fossil fuel companies lied and
| misled the public and bought out our governments for the last 50
| years?
|
| IMHO we should be seizing the fossil fuel companies' assets and
| using them for disaster relief around the world due to the
| catastrophe they have deliberately caused.
|
| The talk about insurance rates is a deliberate distraction.
| x0x0 wrote:
| > _The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes
| and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history
| in these areas because of climate change_
|
| I saw an article on npr [1] which basically agrees with the
| chart on the blogpost. I 1980, there were 3 disasters a year
| that cost $1B, inflation adjusted. In 2024, 24. The second
| chart in the npr article is pretty terrifying.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/08/nx-s1-5143320/hurricanes-
| clim...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Without accounting for population growth in high risk areas
| this is meaningless. If the population and housing units in a
| floodplain doubles, a $500M 1980s disaster becomes a $1B 2024
| disaster. That's not to mention the above-inflation increase
| in the cost of housing which probably bumps these numbers up
| as well.
| greenthrow wrote:
| That is a red herring. The frequency and intensity of the
| wildfires has increased. Stop repeating fossil fuel talking
| points meant to distract from climate change.
| ggm wrote:
| Don't agree. Well partially. I also think the privatise the
| profits socialise the losses story is strong, and the coal and
| oil interests should pony up more remediation costs.
|
| But insurance is one of the best signals we have to true
| risk/consequence/likelihood, _which commercial interests pay
| attention to_
|
| The best long term outcome here would be rebuilding safer but
| the downside will be "which excludes the poor" -that's where I
| think state and federal policy should apply the lever: require
| socialised housing outcomes.
|
| Price controls on insurance forces socialised losses. Better is
| some middle ground: mandate insurance, demand adequate
| mitigations and defences. But losing the price signal is bad.
| greenthrow wrote:
| The losses were already socialized without the controls. Look
| at how the insurance companies always behave in these
| situations. They always find a way to stick the public with
| the bill. Don't listen to the corporate talking points. The
| price controls may have been stupid but they are a
| distraction.
| apsec112 wrote:
| If you ask Americans to vote to make gas more expensive to stop
| climate change (eg. the Washington carbon tax referenda), they
| say no. America burns lots of fossil fuels because it's what
| the voters want. If every private fossil fuel company shut down
| tomorrow, there would be riots in the streets, and then oil and
| gas would be imported from abroad.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Did you miss the part where I said the public has been lied
| to for the past 50 years?
|
| I didn't say we shut off all the gas pumps tomorrow. It will
| obviously take time to transition off. I said we seize their
| assets and use the proceeds for climate relief. We can keep
| the revenue coming and using the profits for disaster relief
| while we transition off fossil fuels. It's not that hard to
| understand.
| pkaye wrote:
| Makes sense since even the French people protested a carbon
| tax back in 2019.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46460445
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The Los Angeles fires are not really about climate change.
| There have been wildfires there for centuries, it's part of the
| ecosystem.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Yes I remember as a kid in the 80s when wildfires woukd
| devastate LA every year. Oh wait no it did not happen until
| recently.
|
| Yes wildfires do happen in nature. No this is not normal for
| this area. Yes it is about climate change. Stop believinf
| fossil fuel company propaganda.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| In some parts of California, fires recur with some
| regularity. In Oakland, for example, fires of various size
| and ignition occurred in 1923, 1931, 1933, 1937, 1946,
| 1955, 1960, 1961, 1968, 1970, 1980, 1990, 1991, 1995, 2002,
| and 2008. _Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino
| County, and Los Angeles County are other examples._ Orange
| and San Bernardino counties share a border that runs north
| to south through the Chino Hills State Park, with the park
| 's landscape ranging from large green coastal sage scrub,
| grassland, and woodland, to areas of brown sparsely dense
| vegetation made drier by droughts or hot summers. The
| valley's grass and barren land can become easily
| susceptible to dry spells and drought, therefore making it
| a prime spot for brush fires and conflagrations, many of
| which have occurred since 1914. Hills and canyons have seen
| brush or wildfires in 1914, the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s,
| 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and into today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
| greenthrow wrote:
| Stop trying to muddy the waters, we already agree that
| wildfires do happen. Nobody disputes that. The frequency
| and intensity of what we are seeing in recent years is
| what is not normal. That is due to climate change because
| of the increased frequency and duration of droughts as
| well as increased winds.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The Santa Anas getting stronger is very much related to
| climate change.
| ericd wrote:
| We need a high per-ton carbon tax, with all revenue dividended
| out per-capita to offset the inflation. This would eliminate
| the green premium on a great number of clean alternatives and
| avoid the problems of the government picking where to invest,
| letting the market handle that instead.
|
| And if those companies don't find other things to do (they'd be
| quite good at geothermal, or durable carbon sequestration, with
| all their drilling and fracking expertise), then they'll go
| bankrupt without needing to do anything so extreme as
| nationalizing/seizing/whatever.
| nullc wrote:
| What evidence do you have that these fires have anything to do
| with climate change? They appear to be adequately explained by
| the known behavior of the region, and to the extent that
| they're not the radical increases in habitation and the
| systematic suppression of small fires is enough to cover any
| gap.
|
| Ironically there is a great case that varrious environmental
| groups that vigorously opposed controlled burns are among the
| greatest proximal human causes of the current situation. If
| careful analysis concluded so, would you support seizing their
| assets for use as disaster relief?
| greenthrow wrote:
| The frequency and intensity of droughts in the area has
| increased due to climate change. The increased winds is due
| to climate change. It is obvious. It is not explained by
| "radical population increase".
|
| Stop trying to distract with fossil fuel propaganda trying to
| distract with everthing else they can. Yes controlled burns
| still happen but it is also understandable that people would
| be jumpy about them with the problems fire has been causing
| in that area in recent years.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Every year, humanity grows richer, more resilient to natural
| disasters, and more capable of predicting natural disasters and
| their negative outcomes. The point of insurance is to spread the
| expected burden of calamities that will affect a minority of a
| population to the entire population, so that those affected will
| have a financial safety net. This principle works regardless of
| how disastrous or prone to calamity a population is. If there
| will be more fires, more hurricanes, etc, the market will favor
| homes built in different locations, different architectural
| styles, etc in response to changing premiums and probabilities of
| disaster. We don't live in a world like in 1905 where an
| earthquake would lead to a fire that burns down an entire city.
| Prosperity simply requires changing to circumstances where valid.
| layman51 wrote:
| I agree with your analysis of how insurance works. But,
| wouldn't the burden of calamities only spread amongst the
| insurance holders? I am not sure what the factors are, but if a
| lot more people go without insurance (because they are
| independently wealthy or live in an uninsurable location),
| doesn't change the calculation?
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| People who go without insurance because they live in an
| uninsurable location would leave those who remain insured
| better off, because the insurance company would be less
| likely to need to make an exorbitant payout to the victims in
| the disaster-prone area. This is of course true as long as
| insurers don't manipulate the market to keep premiums high
| despite their total expected claim outlay lowering.
|
| As an insurance buyer, in a hypothetically ideal market
| situation, you would want all those who also purchase from
| the same insurer to have the lowest risk of needing an
| expensive claim paid. The lower the expected payout * risk of
| disaster means lower premiums for the insurer to still make
| an expected profit.
|
| I think what will happen is simply: Houses are built in
| places which are more insurable, existing danger-prone houses
| will exist until they are destroyed, until then they will
| increasingly be status objects for the elite who can afford
| the loss and have inaccurate risk appraisal. The fact that so
| many valuable objects are kept in Malibu/Palisades homes
| despite fires happening there a lot (as recent as 2018)
| indicates homeowners in disaster-prone areas aren't acting
| perfectly rationally.
| Arainach wrote:
| >We don't live in a world like in 1905 where an earthquake
| would lead to a fire that burns down an entire city
|
| I'm not convinced that that's true, and even if it is a huge
| chunk of population (world, US, pick your area, it applies
| broadly) keep fighting to regress us to these periods.
|
| People complaining about rules they don't understand is in some
| sense as old as the existence of rules, but the internet has
| dramatically increased the number of people who consider
| themselves experts on politics, healthcare, construction,
| electrical code, and every other topic on the sun, and who are
| proud of ignoring the science and the rules and who go out of
| their way to avoid permits, inspections, etc.
|
| At the same time a significant chunk of the population works to
| defund and defang all government, preventing the existing rules
| and codes - labor protections, fire protections, food safety
| protections, etc. - from being adequately monitored and
| enforced.
|
| So you have a huge mix of things which are old and degrading,
| things which were never built right, and things which people
| are actively modifying in dangerous ways. People have a false
| sense of confidence build during the years where we were
| enforcing these rules; I do not believe that confidence is
| still warranted.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > At the same time a significant chunk of the population
| works to defund and defang all government, preventing the
| existing rules and codes - labor protections, fire
| protections, food safety protections, etc. - from being
| adequately monitored and enforced.
|
| This isn't helped by actual bad rules and regulations on the
| books. Some minor examples are the prop 95 warnings on every
| damn thing or the way CAFE standards work to encourage the
| sale of more pickup trucks. I don't blame some people for
| wanting to scrap the whole regulatory system after
| encountering enough of these.
| Arainach wrote:
| >I don't blame some people
|
| You should. Just because something is imperfect doesn't
| make it bad. Should the truck loophole be closed? Yes. Has
| CAFE improved every other class of vehicle? Yes.
| Sabinus wrote:
| >I don't blame some people for wanting to scrap the whole
| regulatory system after encountering enough of these.
|
| Regulation can used to save lives and improve outcomes, but
| it can also be used to suppress competitors or favor a
| particular business practice and stifle innovation.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Plenty of things were built just fine or better and hold up
| with regular maintenance or modifications, and many are
| proving to have only been practical to build during a time
| that had a lower floor for better or worse depending on the
| thing.
|
| Would some places have become what they are today had they
| not built their subway system when it was opportune or
| hilariously less expensive than it is now? The good things we
| can iterate on or refactor now would have way more overhead
| to build from scratch at todays standards, not all of which
| are inherently useful or justified. Sometimes a whole city
| burns down or all the labor was forced, which sucks and we
| don't want, but sometimes you're having to get shadow studies
| done to build anything higher than a bungalow
| jmyeet wrote:
| The California (and Florida) situation is easily explainable [1].
| As this video points out you have these forces in play:
|
| 1. The state who sets insurance price caps for political
| expediency, basically to increase house prices (because they'd go
| down if insurance prices could float freely). BTW we have
| examples of areas that are uninsurable like the Florida Keys;
|
| 2. The homeowners who want their house prices to go up and want
| to pay as little as possible for home insurance; and
|
| 3. Insurance companies who can't write too many policies so they
| remain solvent. Price caps ultimately lead to insurers leaving
| the market.
|
| LA in particular has competing problems: wildfires and
| earthquakes. If you want to avoid total loss due to wildfires,
| first you wouldn't build in Pacific Palisades at all. It's a
| vegetation rich area between hills with potentially high winds.
| If you want to avoid fire loss, you would build out of concrete
| not timber-framed buildings.
|
| But the problem is that earthquakes have the opposite building
| priorities. Lumber is actually quite good in earthquake zones
| because you tend to get less loss of life from the collapse of
| timber houses.
|
| Now you can build concrete houses that are earthquake-resistant
| (eg in Japan) but it's expensive.
|
| Ultimately all of this comes down to a malaise brought on by high
| house prices. Voters consistently vote for policies that increase
| their house prices with absolutely no concern for the
| externalities.
|
| If it now costs $1 million to build an "average" house, then
| you're going to be spending $20,000+ a year on insurance. If your
| house only cost $100,000, you wouldn't have that problem.
|
| It's even worse in California because a lot of property taxes are
| capped so the state government can't even recoupe taxes from a
| lot of high-priced property but they suffer the costs of it (eg
| by being the insurer of last resort).
|
| [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2Jek6a6/
| amazingamazing wrote:
| a lot of this here is really what the problem is. for whatever
| reason, california wants to try to micromanage this particular
| microeconomy (insurance), but it will fail.
| nullc wrote:
| > Now you can build concrete houses that are earthquake-
| resistant (eg in Japan) but it's expensive.
|
| It's expensive here, but is it expensive in Japan? Here its'
| expensive because it requires extensive steelwork which takes
| you entirely out of the domain of rubberstamp building approval
| and into needing PE-stamped bespoke engineering and also gets
| overbuilt to a greater degree.
| onewheeltom wrote:
| Yes
| paleotrope wrote:
| It seems like "severe storms" have increased quite a bit, the
| other categories not so much. What does "severe storm" mean here?
| Doesn't seem to mean hurricanes or winter storms. So what gives?
| Is this just political patronage handed out under the cover of
| claiming a big storm knocked some trees down?
| paleotrope wrote:
| Ok so the source,
| https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series/US says,
|
| "tornado outbreaks, high wind, hailstorms"
|
| So most of this cost is roof damage. Which is an area rife with
| insurance fraud and getting worse.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Roof damage fraud ... my understanding is the insured has
| roof damage, takes a payment from the insurance company but
| does _not_ repair roof, next storm comes along: roof damage
| again!
|
| Easy enough I think to solve.
| trollbridge wrote:
| The main problem is (a) the cost of roofers has gone up
| significantly, (b) as a country we switched from more durable
| forms of roofing like slate to cheap forms that are harder to
| repair and easier to damage, like asphalt shingles, and (c)
| the roofing industry is now full of bad actors committing
| near-insurance fraud.
| franciscop wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow this: "why are we subsidizing people to
| rebuild in places that are clearly no longer habitable"
|
| Does/Why would the insurance assume the subsidy is for people
| rebuilding in the same place? Money is fungible and so it doesn't
| need to be in the same place, at all. What I'd expect is that
| insurance for those hard-to-insure places would skyrocket and
| thus a new balance would be achieved.
| floatrock wrote:
| You would expect that in a rational market. But go down a
| reading hole about flood insurance. tl;dr: in many places in
| the US, the only company that offers flood insurance is the US
| government because everyone else has pulled out. And people do
| tend to use the money to rebuild in the same location --
| reasons as varied as "I like my beachhouse" to "my entire
| community was born and lived in this parish and I aint
| leaving".
|
| Now that the physics of insolvency are starting to overcome
| political pressure of keeping Daddy Bailout-Bucks around, and
| people are whispering "managed retreat" without actually being
| able to say it outloud around polite company, we are starting
| to see programs like "we'll make you whole in case of a flood,
| but you aren't allowed to rebuild on the lot if you take our
| payout". But those buyouts are often met with yells of
| "government is taking my property!" because again, no one wants
| to face the stark reality of managed retreat.
| Sabinus wrote:
| >people are whispering "managed retreat" without actually
| being able to say it outloud around polite company, we are
| starting to see programs like "we'll make you whole in case
| of a flood, but you aren't allowed to rebuild on the lot if
| you take our payout". But those buyouts are often met with
| yells of "government is taking my property!" because again,
| no one wants to face the stark reality of managed retreat.
|
| I know politics is famous for elites abusing it for their own
| benefit, but _sometimes_ the population is truly not ready
| for something that the elites understand is utterly necessary
| and that 's not a bad thing. The risks and benefits of an
| elite class, I guess.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I live right next to a flood plain and the government
| doesn't allow building in 100 year flood plains. This means
| you can't get a mortgage for it, and the land is also very
| cheap - which can be used for grazing animals, growing
| crops, hunting preserves, or perhaps camping. The land is
| dry much of the year.
|
| I have observed new owners do things like build open sided
| barns (which legally aren't a building). Other owners live
| in camper trailers on the property. One just finished
| building an (illegal, obviously didn't get a building
| permit) property up on stilts (which will get washed away
| if any serious flooding happens).
|
| On the plus side, this is all not insurance and not
| mortgageable, and also won't survive being sold to someone
| else, as no title insurance would cover these structures
| and a mortgage lender would require they be torn down
| first.
| whatever1 wrote:
| No it's just that the insurance companies want mandated insurance
| pools for which they just receive checks.
|
| In health insurance they don't cover the elderly, and until Obama
| they did not cover people with prior conditions.
|
| For home insurance they don't cover flood get your are mandated
| to carry one if you have a mortgage.
|
| In life insurance they do not cover you if you have a disease.
|
| It's more like a lottery rather than insurance.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Some people have always been uninsurable.
|
| When you become uninsurable yourself, all you're doing is
| crossing an imaginary line that has always been there, and kept
| in imaginary condition precisely to insure that your mental
| health is stable enough to keep on paying more than anything
| else :\
|
| You're not supposed to notice this.
|
| Whether or not you crossed that line due to any fault of your
| own, or from the line moving past you with a whimper or a
| whoosh, you're also not supposed to be able to tell the
| difference until it's too late.
|
| Working with the big ships that are often covered by some of
| the most well-established insurers in the world, it turns out
| that when you really need them to pay a claim, _the stronger
| your insurance company, the more likely their lawyers will
| outmaneuver yours_ , and the claim will not be paid.
|
| Otherwise it could be paying the claim but denying further
| coverage which the limited number of alternative underwriters
| can also deny. That's a hell of a negotiating position.
| whatever1 wrote:
| If ship owners with hundreds of millions in assets cannot
| fight them, who can?
| zeroCalories wrote:
| This seems like such a gloomy article. There are plenty of other
| solutions. If you can't insure a home, that home's price should
| come down. If there is a 5% chance my home is destroyed every
| year I would expect a steep discount. I could see myself gambling
| on such a home for 50% off. Alternatively if you don't wanna
| gamble, just move to a place that's less risky. If moving is too
| much for you, renting may still be an option. Yes the increased
| risk will push prices higher, but it will also crash property
| prices, so who knows what will happen. Yes land owners in these
| areas will be screwed, but you don't have a right to returns on
| your investment.
| plant-ian wrote:
| Article seems a bit black and white. After fire insurance dumped
| my mother's insurance, the "Fair" Plan started out with some
| similar black and white with insights like "zipcode bad for fire"
| == "you get worst price". Recently their direction has gotten
| better, better clearance == better pricing, better building ==
| better pricing, etc. This seems like a better direction. Monthly
| inspections maybe even == better pricing. Repairs == better
| pricing. Community changes == better pricing. I think there is a
| lot of gradual room for improvement here. Ie. More spacing
| between homes, yard clearance, hydrant locations, accessible fire
| water sources, quarterly inspections by qualified inspectors,
| etc. Maybe highly exposed communities would have 10,000 gallon
| water tanks every square block just for fire.
|
| I think it is easy for people to "dump" on some of these higher
| priced real estate incidents seen recently but this is also
| affecting people on social security. What are we going to do just
| let their house burn down and then just have a bunch of homeless
| senior citizens in the mix. Why even have government? Seems like
| a terrible country to live in if a 30 year old needs to plan
| their house situation out into their 80s.
|
| Also seems a bit ironic to me that you get insurance to cover
| unexpected future expenses but when insurance takes losses then
| they can just drop you because .. the losses were unexpected.
| They've known for 20++ years and I'm sure some... money was
| made... Did they put some away for this situation? Also if you
| personally experience a loss they also drop you almost
| immediately.
|
| This idea that we'd just let insurance companies do whatever is
| *nuts*. Has that ever worked? Honestly pure capitalism seems like
| the real behind the scenes American dream or fantasy. This same
| climate change most likely was created by companies making
| buckets of money with no plan to deal with the side-effects we
| experience now. Just let the market take care of it....
|
| These companies aren't about making "some profit" they want to
| make as much profit as possible. Is some 75 year widow living in
| her and her dead husband's house in Eureka, CA going to convince
| them to keep insuring her house at a reasonable price? Even if
| she paid the same insurance company for 30 years?
|
| I think the solution is going to require some government
| intervention because insurance companies just don't care and it
| will be hard for new players to innovate quickly enough to tackle
| such a large crisis. Ie. legislating the inspections, legislating
| the fire-resistant building guidelines + insurance scale,
| subsidizing certain low income locations, working with
| communities to improve fire safety and resources. Some work has
| happened but clearly it is not happening fast enough.
| motohagiography wrote:
| a practical problem is that the financial instruments insurance
| companies create (insurance linked securities or ILS, catastrophe
| bonds, and other structured products) are not available to retail
| investors, who would likely buy a lot of higher risk investments
| if they were allowed to, and this would provide a lot more
| collateral for writing new policies. if you want more of it,
| deregulate it. it's that simple.
| incrudible wrote:
| _"Losses rise with inflation, of course, but the losses are
| rising far above background inflation."_
|
| Losses are very much in line with _asset price_ inflation. If a
| house rises in value for no good reason other than loose monetary
| policy, so does the compensation. At the same time, insurers
| struggle to find safe yields to match these cost increases when
| that same monetary policy keeps interest rates low.
|
| Looking at the chart pictured, one would expect that extreme
| weather events have increased dramatically after 2000, but that
| is not the case:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters
| purplezooey wrote:
| It's hard to view insurance as a viable business when overpaying
| executives has become the norm. Take State Farm, for instance:
| its CEO was awarded $50 million in compensation over just two
| years -- 2022 and 2023. The industry is rife with waste and high
| barriers to entry.
| itake wrote:
| 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?
| system7rocks wrote:
| 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 + benefits (an
| enormous amount of money).
| itake wrote:
| > 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.
| Snoddas wrote:
| It will have atleast be > than zero, and doing it every
| year instead of giving it away to some overpriced CEO
| will it will accumulate.
| EraYaN wrote:
| I don't think you quite get how little money it is for
| these types of operations, 25m is essentially missing 2-3
| zeros before it becomes anywhere near usable and even
| worth it to bother.
| itake wrote:
| State Farm's revenue was $104.2 billion for 2023. His
| payment was 0.02% of the revenue. That's basically a
| rounding error.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Wouldn't it make more sense to compare it to profit
| rather than revenue? They suffered a $6.3 billion dollar
| net loss in 2023.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > Take State Farm, for instance: its CEO was awarded $50
| million in compensation over just two years -- 2022 and 2023.
|
| Honestly, no one would care about CEO pay if the insurance
| companies would just pay out and make customers whole. Instead,
| there are mechanisms and processes in place to keep premiums
| coming in and to reduce or refuse claim payouts.
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial
| building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine,
| survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance.
| It's not what most people want today in the US.
| Sabinus wrote:
| If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we
| can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If
| the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant,
| modest homes do, then people will adapt.
| iandanforth wrote:
| "Correctly" is doing a lot of work here. Some readers might
| miss that this is double edged. Insurance is a _mandated
| product_. You don 't have a choice if you want a mortgage, or
| want to run a business. So while it is true that the
| sustainable price for insurance in many areas is higher than
| what current regulations allow, let's not forget what happens
| in an unregulated insurance market; price gouging.
| chii wrote:
| > unregulated insurance market; price gouging.
|
| with sufficient competition, it is impossible to price
| gouge.
|
| So if there is supposed price gouging, then there must be
| insufficient competition. Therefore, the source of the lack
| of competition would need to be removed (ostensibly, by
| gov't - such as increasing business loans so that new
| insurance companies can be started).
| kstenerud wrote:
| Or, you need to be pragmatic, realize that you're not
| gods and won't create a perfect system that can't be
| exploited, and instead tackle the issue from multiple
| angles while revising your approach as the exploiters
| attack.
|
| Don't let the perfect be the enemy of good enough.
| d0mine wrote:
| "good enough" assumes a lot about the rules of the game
| here. Imagine, the game is: "heads I win, tails you lose"
| and then read your comment.
| kstenerud wrote:
| And these kinds of defeatist attitudes are what allow the
| bad guys to win.
|
| You either fight the good fight, or roll over and die.
| Your choice.
| d0mine wrote:
| Who is more likely to act: who thinks it is "good enough"
| or "the game is rigged"?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Or, the market lets the gods do their work, rather than
| the government acting like one.
|
| --esoteric capitalism
| Panzer04 wrote:
| What are you trying to say here?
| kstenerud wrote:
| I'm saying that running a government is a lot like
| running a ship:
|
| You can't just let the currents and tidal forces ("the
| invisible hand") run the show unconditionally because
| even though they can propel you great distances at very
| low cost, they'll eventually throw you upon the reefs.
|
| And you can't just let the rowers and tillers
| (legislators & executive) run the show unconditionally
| because they'll end up exhausting themselves with little
| to show for it as they fight against the winds and
| currents when they should cooperate.
|
| It's a balancing act that requires some science, some
| experience, some luck, and a steady hand - and a capable
| and honorable captain and crew who believe in the
| mission.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I still don't follow.
|
| If I'm reading it right, and the prior context, we
| shouldn't allow private insurers to charge the prices
| they want for insurance?
|
| What do you want us to do? Ultimately someone has to pay
| for the bad outcomes happening here - either that's
| homeowners in risky areas, insurance shareholders or the
| general taxpayer, depending on where you fall.
|
| If you don't make the ultimate originators of the risk
| pay for it (people in risky areas) they won't stop doing
| the stupid thing and others will bear the cost. Arguably
| that is the greatest strength of the "free market" -
| directing the efforts of _everyone_ in the same,
| positive, direction.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Because although in the recent LA case we're dealing with
| rich folks who could shoulder the increased burden, often
| it's the poor areas that are riskier, and where the
| people there have little choice over where they can live.
|
| There's no universal solution. A "free market" approach
| will work in some areas, and fail spectacularly in
| others. Same goes for a full-on centralized control
| approach.
|
| And in all cases, you also have the confounding factor of
| bad actors gaming the system - and your current tools may
| be insufficient to meet the challenge.
|
| So you need a human guiding hand to make sure things
| don't go too far out of whack.
|
| This isn't an either-or decision. Stability doesn't care
| about whose motives or approaches are more "pure".
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Agree to disagree.
|
| The "human hand" guiding outcomes still needs to get it's
| resources from somewhere, presumably from government tax
| income. I disagree this will necessarily result in better
| global outcomes than the free market.
|
| In cases where almost everyone agrees people should
| always have access to a service (healthcare) I think it
| does make sense to obligate everyone to pay. I don't
| think it makes sense in this specific case of wildfire
| insurance.
|
| The free market here seems to be failing by your
| definition because it can't make money. To me that's it
| succeeding. It's demonstrating that it's underpriced, and
| people being unwilling to pay the necessary prices shows
| that they need to find somewhere else to live.
|
| Amusingly enough, the lack of housing itself is another
| problem caused mostly by human-guided hands in
| government, not the free market. Enlightened despotism
| always sounds great when they agree with your
| perspectives, the reality is rarely so smooth.
| eric-hu wrote:
| Where do we find an honorable captain in this day and
| age? And how do we get them into the captain's seat?
| derektank wrote:
| I mean, there's sometimes simply not enough capital
| available to support the creation of further competition
| in a sector. And government subsidies in the form of
| cheap business loans are sort of robbing Peter to pay
| Paul. You're simply allocating capital from one sector
| (the one being taxed) to another
| roenxi wrote:
| If the regulators have defined 'price gouging' as a price
| substantially below the break even mark, literally any
| profitable insurance product is implicitly believed by them
| to be price gouging. The US does a weird thing where
| "insurance" no longer means pooling risk but some sort of
| transfer payment welfare system. If they're going to define
| "price gouging" as profitable activity it is hard to see
| how the economy is going to function.
|
| Allowing insurers to make a profit and run a business
| without interference is going to be cheaper - and in most
| instances better - than whatever the politicians are trying
| to build here. If you get rid of all the mandatory-this and
| price-gouging-thats then to stay in business insurers have
| sell products that people want to buy at a competitive yet
| sustainable price. It works for food, it'd work here too.
| hakfoo wrote:
| The math of insurance suggests that, if it needs to be
| widely carried (either due to things like mortgage
| requirements, or the simple realization most people don't
| have enough resources to absorb a major catastrophe
| themselves), the most economical way to go is to have a
| single risk pool that's as broad and diverse as possible,
| so it can swallow a large clustered crisis more easily.
| Yes, this is a bit of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
|
| I always found it funny when insurance marketing talks
| about "personalized rates", when the goal is to DE-
| PERSONALIZE the risk. If you have 10,000 customers in Los
| Angeles, and 5 million elsewhere, you can either isolate
| the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the
| risk, which will be unviable as a business and probably
| politically touchy too, or you can include them in the
| broad pool, and the people with a full-cinderblock home
| in a non-flammable state pay $20 more a year so the
| entire endeavour can work.
|
| The concept probably works better if you have some
| concept of social cohesion to lean on-- you might not get
| the best possible outcome personally, but the system
| itself is more robust for everyone.
| roenxi wrote:
| What if Paul built his house somewhere less flammable? I
| see options here where Peter doesn't need to be robbed,
| he could pay a fair rate and Paul could make less risky
| decisions.
|
| If one pool of people are taking a bad deal vs the market
| rate when buying insurance then it isn't really insurance
| any more. It is a transfer payment a.k.a. welfare. Which
| is cool and all in the sense that welfare is a social
| tool that exists. But calling it 'insurance' is
| needlessly polluting the language. If people expect to
| hoover money off others then they should be charged more
| until the expected return of everyone in the insured pool
| is equal. If the payouts are going to be held equal in
| the event of a disaster then that means the price of
| insurance has to vary depending on the risk profile of
| the customers.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| > It is a transfer payment a.k.a. welfare
|
| Its called solidarity and yes, it means some people NOT
| have to pay more but others recieve more. Paul AND Peter
| get the security of disaster coverage in exchange. This
| is what you pay for. A big risk pool and not your
| individual disaster recovery.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| If you want "solidarity" you need a government service.
| Private insurance has every incentive to price things
| _accurately_ and not subsidize higher-risk people. If you
| tell insurance companies what they have to charge, they
| have every reason to say "nope, I don't want to offer
| that service at that price, that doesn't make economic
| sense".
| oytis wrote:
| Insurance that is able to quantify risks precisely and
| set prices individually based on that is useless. If it
| has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's
| guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone. Whereas
| solidarity can bring a better society - which even those
| who have to occasionally pay more benefit from in the
| end.
| roenxi wrote:
| > If it has to make any profits - or at least pay
| salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.
|
| It is insurance. You pay money, the company takes away
| the risk. That doesn't make it a bad deal, that makes it
| a service. That is like complaining about a hypothetical
| garbage company that charges for taking away trash even
| though the trash might have some notional value.
|
| Insurance isn't an investment scheme. If you want to pay
| money for a positive-expected-value deal, go buy stocks
| and bonds.
| purple_turtle wrote:
| whole point of insurance is that you pay for avoiding
| risk
|
| in other words, you pay more than you would on average
| loss from bad events - but you avoid catastrophic losses
| that would break your life
|
| that is why insuring your phone is likely a bad idea (as
| you can pay for a new one) but liability insurance or
| insuring your home/flat may make sense
|
| > If it has to make any profits - or at least pay
| salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.
|
| paying 3k per year, to avoid 1% risk of 250k losses may
| be a good idea, especially if 3k loss is survivable
| without trouble and 250k loss would be more than 90 times
| worse.
| oytis wrote:
| > paying 3k per year, to avoid 1% risk of 250k losses may
| be a good idea
|
| You are basically guaranteed to pay 3k to avoid financial
| risk with a mean value of 2,5k. That sounds like a
| fallacy to me (isn't it the same as saying that paying 3k
| for 1% chance of winning 250k is a good idea?), may make
| sense psychologically though.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That logic is reasonable if you can trivially afford
| 250k; in that case, you might choose to self-insure.
| However, that logic does not hold if the 1% event is not
| something you can afford.
|
| Every dollar does not have the same incremental value.
| Going from $1B to $1B-$250k is not the same as going from
| $300k to $50k, and definitely not the same as going from
| $50k to -$200k.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > Insurance that is able to quantify risks precisely and
| set prices individually based on that is useless.
|
| This is simply untrue.
|
| This may be true for health insurance, because there is a
| strong moral case to be made that is unfair and illiberal
| to make people pay more for genetics or simple bad luck
| that result in them being likely to need more health
| care.
|
| It is not true for home insurance, where people can
| choose where to live and choose what kind of housing to
| live in.
|
| The purpose of home insurance is to reduce time-based
| variance for disaster, not for people in low-risk
| properties to subsidize people in high-risk properties.
|
| It is not "solidarity" for someone in a steel-and-
| concrete house with a metal roof who clears brush and
| trees from around their house to subsidize someone who
| lives in wooden mansion who doesn't take any fire
| precautions. It is a perverse incentive.
|
| > If it has to make any profits - or at least pay
| salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.
|
| Again, it is _not_ the purpose of insurance for it to be
| positive expected value for people in high risk homes! It
| is expected for insurance to be negative expected value.
| The point is to reduce variance.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Surely you don't want your taxes to go into rebuilding
| other people's beachfront houses as many times as needed.
| Show a little empathy!
|
| https://reason.com/2024/01/10/the-feds-shouldnt-
| subsidize-fa...
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Again, it is not the purpose of insurance for it to be
| positive expected value for people in high risk homes!
|
| Insurance should not be positive expected value for
| _anyone_ ; if it is, either the actuaries are doing a
| poor job, or the product is a loss leader, or there's
| some regulatory reason the company can't pull out of the
| market. (Or, you are in a _very rare_ circumstance where
| you actually know better than the actuary.)
| kalkin wrote:
| Incentivizing people to build homes that are likely
| enough to burn down as to be economically uninsurable is
| an absolutely wild abuse of the term "solidarity".
| Solidarity is the idea that an injury to one is an injury
| to all, not the idea that choices should have no
| consequences and the environment shouldn't constrain
| humans; the only way you can possibly sustain a world in
| which people actually treat an injury to one as an injury
| to all, is together with some effort to avoid people from
| gratuitously exposing themselves to injury.
| snacksmcgee wrote:
| The tricky thing about global climate change is the
| "global" part. Funny how that works.
| fakedang wrote:
| The LA fires aren't a climate fire though.
|
| For other disasters, while climate change is "global",
| the effects are pretty much localized and to various
| degrees. Some places have had adapted construction to
| those kinds of blue moon disasters since centuries, so
| why should they part with more money?
| logicchains wrote:
| This completely ignores incentives. If insurance isn't
| allowed to charge people more who live in fireprone or
| floodprone areas, more people will live in such areas,
| and overall society will have to spend more money
| rebuilding when disasters inevitably hit those areas.
| Personalised insurance pricing would allow insurers to
| charge much more to people living in such areas, which
| incentivises people not to live there. It's also a moral
| issue: if everyone pays the same rate, then people who
| did the right thing and chose to live in an area that
| wasn't fire or flood prone are subsidising people who did
| the risky thing.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| He wrote about risky business too
| https://substack.com/home/post/p-154965705
| snacksmcgee wrote:
| What about the people who drive cars, vote for more
| suburban sprawl, and actively work against reducing CO2
| emissions? When are we going to charge them THEIR fair
| share?
| Ray20 wrote:
| > This completely ignores incentives.
|
| For socialists this is a goal, not an obstacle.
| patmcc wrote:
| Except if insurance company A does that, insurance
| company B will call the full-cinderblock home and say
| "hey, we can save you $20".
|
| If it's a product you actually want everyone to carry
| (like health insurance) it should probably be the
| government offering it.
| 15155 wrote:
| Which implicitly means: "everyone must always pay into
| the government pool."
|
| If low-risk individuals are allowed to make their own
| choices, they will choose an insurer that caters to their
| group, thus depriving the government "option" of
| "premiums."
|
| Just like with school property tax vouchers: if people
| are allowed to directly appropriate the benefits of their
| funds, less "desirable" schools would receive less
| funding.
|
| Mandated government "insurance" is a form of welfare.
| patmcc wrote:
| >>>Mandated government "insurance" is a form of welfare.
|
| Yes? Of course? That doesn't make it a bad idea.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > I always found it funny when insurance marketing talks
| about "personalized rates", when the goal is to DE-
| PERSONALIZE the risk.
|
| Actuarial science is not often associated with "fun" but
| they have been partying for centuries.
|
| "In 1662, a London draper named John Graunt showed that
| there were predictable patterns of longevity and death in
| a defined group, or cohort, of people, despite the
| uncertainty about the future longevity or mortality of
| any one individual. This study became the basis for the
| original life table. Combining this idea with that of
| compound interest and annuity valuation, it became
| possible to set up an insurance scheme to provide life
| insurance or pensions for a group of people, and to
| calculate with some degree of accuracy each member's
| necessary contributions to a common fund, assuming a
| fixed rate of interest."
|
| > you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them
| the "real" price of the risk [...] or you can include
| them in the broad pool
|
| Maybe you don't understand that the insurance business is
| based on including everyone in one pool (so it can
| swallow a large clustered crisis more easily) AND charge
| them (more than) the real price of the risk.
| refurb wrote:
| By eliminating personalization you're doing the same
| thing - removing price as a signal.
|
| It's good when insurers personalize! Install screens to
| prevents embers from entering roof vents? Great. You
| should get a discount!
|
| It's a win-win. Consumers are incentivized to take
| measures to reduce risk.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A lot of the "big boy" insurance on ships etc actually
| have inspectors - they'll come and inspect your ship (or
| industrial plant etc) periodically to confirm it meets
| the agreed safety standards. And if it doesn't, no
| insurance! That really aligns incentives.
| refurb wrote:
| This is a good point.
|
| You also have insurance companies that will incentivize
| risk reduction by subsidizing alterations - if you clear
| any trees within X ft of home, they will give you $1000
| towards it.
|
| But yes on the inspections. I've had home insurance
| inspections around electrical and plumbing. They wanted
| to make sure it was at code as it was an older home.
| andy800 wrote:
| _you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them
| the "real" price of the risk, which will be unviable as a
| business_
|
| NOT lining up the premium with the actual risk is what's
| non-viable.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > If you have 10,000 customers in Los Angeles, and 5
| million elsewhere, you can either isolate the LA
| customers and charge them the "real" price
|
| That's the only way.
|
| > which will be unviable as a business and probably
| politically touchy too
|
| Why would it be? If you live in Los Angeles - doesn't
| mean you don't need insurance (even if it several times
| the cost of insurance in the safer areas).
|
| > or you can include them in the broad pool
|
| No, you can't. Your competitor who doesn't do this will
| offer cheaper insurance - because they doesn't distribute
| high risk of small group to everybody else.
|
| > the people with a full-cinderblock home in a non-
| flammable state pay $20 more a year so the entire
| endeavour can work.
|
| Why would they do that? 20 bucks is 20 bucks.
|
| > The concept probably works better if you have some
| concept of social cohesion to lean on
|
| You mean if you with totalitarian governance deprive
| people of the ability to choose? Yeah, that could work. I
| mean, that's how the gulags were justified.
| Folcon wrote:
| I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting is
| different from mandating everyone just get a personal
| savings account, where they must pay some specified
| minimum calculated to cover them in the event of a loss
| of their personal property?
|
| Are you saying that we should only pool risk between
| people in the same risk bucket?
|
| How do you aim to determine the resolution of that risk?
| Not to mention calculating it accurately?
| 15155 wrote:
| > Are you saying that we should only pool risk between
| people in the same risk bucket?
|
| People should be free to make that choice even though it
| increases net costs for higher-risk or less-affluent
| individuals.
|
| > How do you aim to determine the resolution of that
| risk? Not to mention calculating it accurately?
|
| By allowing private actuaries to make these pricing
| decisions: skilled organizations will succeed, others
| will fail.
| Folcon wrote:
| I'm trying to work out how what you're describing works,
| first I have to understand you before I can form an
| opinion on it :)...
|
| Ok, I get how you want to value risk, independent
| actuaries. I suppose, there's some bias there as insurers
| might lean on them to adjust the risk to be more
| favourable to them and as they'll be repeat business,
| they're likely to comply, but let's assume we find some
| really honest ones.
|
| So given say a pool of people with similar risk profiles,
| say young professionals in high earning careers, and you
| calculate that they're effective risk is the same so you
| pool them together.
|
| Now, what do you believe an insurer would insure them
| against? And of the things, what would not take them out
| of the pool they've been placed in and put them into a
| different, perhaps smaller pool?
| Ray20 wrote:
| I'm not quite sure you understand what insurance are. You
| have risk, you don't want to have it, so you pay other
| people to took that risk away (to some extent). How those
| people are expected to assess risk? Somehow. That's their
| problem.
|
| It's like how a hair salon owner evaluates the difficulty
| of a haircut. And generally, when you want to have simple
| haircut, but they are gonna charge you extra because
| Jason Statham is their client, and he has very sensitive
| and delicate hair ends, each of which requires a careful
| individual approach... You naturally start wondering what
| Jason Statham's hair situation has to do with your
| haircut.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting is
| different from mandating everyone just get a personal
| savings account
|
| Because insurance will cover you even if your house burns
| down in the first year of coverage, whereas a personal
| savings account will have only a very small amount of
| money in it in the first year of home ownership.
|
| That's the whole point of insurance.
|
| I don't know where the idea came from that the purpose of
| home insurance is for people in low-risk homes to
| subsidize people in high-risk homes, but it's a very
| strange idea.
| Folcon wrote:
| Right, that is the purpose of insurance, to take risk and
| spread it across a population.
|
| Now the simplest way of doing that is you decide whether
| someone is "insurable" or "uninsurable" and then for
| everyone insurable, you define payout criteria and a fair
| pay in rate (premiums) which is based on your ability to
| calculate their risk and taking some extra on top for
| providing the service.
|
| Your skill at:
|
| 1. assessing risk correctly as to whether you take them
| on as clients
|
| 2. calculating their risk correctly and mapping it to a
| price to charge them (premiums)
|
| 3. defining payouts in a way that allows you to pay out
| when things happen to your clients so others trust you to
| pay out, but not so often that you have no working
| capital
|
| broadly determine how well you'll do.
|
| You can do all kinds of other complicated things on top
| of that, but from what I can tell, the fundamental idea
| seems to be that given those considerations, the insurer
| pays out, so the fact that someone has a high risk home
| should be priced into their premiums or they should not
| have been taken on in the first place.
|
| Now you appear to dislike that people who have different
| risk profiles are grouped together, what I'm trying to
| understand is how that works.
|
| For example, in the case of the house burning down:
|
| 1. The insurer pays the homeowner out and increases their
| premiums
|
| 2. The insurer pays the homeowner out and places them
| into a different risk category of people who own similar
| homes, but have had their house burn down, works out
| their new premiums, which are now likely much higher as
| they're in a riskier category and it's likely that
| population is smaller.
|
| I assume you're arguing for something like 2 to happen?
|
| Or is it something else?
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > Now you appear to dislike that people who have
| different risk profiles are grouped together
|
| There is no problem with pooling properties with
| different risk profiles so long as each property pays
| premiums that adequately represent that property's risk
| profile.
| Folcon wrote:
| Don't people who live in higher risk homes already pay
| higher premiums?
|
| Do you believe that's not the case? Or that insurers are
| giving them discounts? Or are the risks miscalculated?
| Insthrowaway wrote:
| I'm in the industry: regarding California,the answer is
| that they aren't paying high enough premiums. Regulators
| have refused to allow catastrophe modeling to set rates,
| so fire prone areas are effectively getting a discount.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > I'm trying to understand how what you're suggesting
|
| Nothing. It's definition of insurance - selling your
| risk.
|
| > Are you saying that we should only pool risk between
| people in the same risk bucket?
|
| I mean, why would people want to be in a bucket with
| people with higher risk?
|
| > How do you aim to determine the resolution of that
| risk? Not to mention calculating it accurately?
|
| These are the problems of insurance companies. At the end
| of the day, the consumer simply chooses the best price
| for his risk.
| kilotaras wrote:
| > or you can include them in the broad pool, and the
| people with a full-cinderblock home in a non-flammable
| state pay $20 more a year so the entire endeavour can
| work
|
| And you immediately start loosing customers to insurers
| that either did the former or left LA alltogether. This
| changes $20 surcharge into $25 surcharge, causing more
| customers to leave, causing surcharge to increase and so
| on.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| This sounds like a very US-centric view and id strongly
| disagree that only the profit motive keeps economies and
| people going.
|
| You almost said it yourself, "The US does a weird thing
| where insurance no longer means pooling risk". Why? Is it
| the profit motive or gov. regulation?
|
| My answer: The selective approach of insurance companies
| mirrors the profit seeking lack of solidarity, which is
| ultimately incompatible with the risk pooling purpose,
| insurance companies are justified with.
|
| Free markets have down sides and failure conditions too
| and only principled gov. regulation can fix it.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > This sounds like a very US-centric view
|
| > My answer: The selective approach of insurance
| companies mirrors the profit seeking lack of solidarity,
| which is ultimately incompatible with the risk pooling
| purpose
|
| What's the non-US-centric view? Lloyd's of London is
| older than the US.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| profit motive does keep the economy going. if you do not
| believe that youre like a flat earther.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Price gouging isn't actually what we're seeing in the most
| disaster prone areas. Insurance companies aren't charging
| open ended prices, they're simply exiting the market.
| Florida for example.
| loeg wrote:
| I believe Florida market exits had more to do with
| litigation-friendliness than premium caps or disaster
| risks. E.g.,
|
| > In 2020, 79 percent of homeowners insurance lawsuits
| nationwide were in Florida--even as the state accounted
| for only 9 percent of the U.S. homeowners insurance
| claims, according to the Florida Office of Insurance
| Regulation.
|
| There were some recent reforms in response (HB 837, 2023;
| SB 2-A, 2022).
| margalabargala wrote:
| Ah, fair point
| jpalawaga wrote:
| They're exiting the market because the states have limits
| on how premiums can increase y/y. The risk modeling
| (which is turning out to be right) says premiums are
| fractional of what they should be. So unable to raise
| premiums, the companies just leave.
|
| Rock, meet hard place.
| CalRobert wrote:
| For what it's worth, you can get a house with no insurance
| or mortgage. They tend to be cheap. I had an uninsured
| thatched cottage for a while, it was 68k
| lostlogin wrote:
| You can have a mortgage with no insurance (after purchase
| day) here in New Zealand. The bank won't like it, but
| also won't know.
| girvo wrote:
| Banks in Australia were the same, but some are now
| starting to demand proof of insurance yearly to counter
| that loophole.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| What's the thinking here? The bank is loaning you money
| and they want to ensure you buy a particular product.
|
| They're the ones with the money. They can easily
| guarantee that you buy the product they want. All they
| need to do is give you less money, buy the product
| themselves, and give it to you.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I don't know what you mean. Banks loan out money for you
| to buy a house, but you don't technically own it (that
| is, you have no title) until it is paid off. The bank
| wants the house itself as collateral for the loan. It
| cannot be collateral if something destroys it in the 30
| years or whatever during which you are repaying the loan.
| Therefore, they demand insurance to make sure that they
| will be repaid. The insurance requirement protects you
| but also the bank, because what do you think the odds are
| that someone who just lost their house in a fire or
| something is going to keep making mortgage payments for a
| pile of ashes?
| hnick wrote:
| I think what you mean is what I wasn't sure about (but
| found with a quick search), some banks do offer home loan
| and insurance bundles here in AU. I found one that
| offered a discount on the insurance if you get the loan
| with them, for the life of the loan.
|
| But legally, you are allowed to change insurers at any
| time. They would probably not be allowed to include that
| as a contract-breaker clause in the loan itself due to
| free-market-reasons, or force you to take only their
| insurance to have the loan (we tend to have a few laws
| about keeping conflicts of interest like this at arms
| length but I'm not sure about this case). But if
| insurance is legally required, I suppose they can ask for
| proof periodically after you leave to terminate the loan.
| girvo wrote:
| The insurance is with anyone. They own the house, not
| you, and so they want to ensure it's not going to burn
| down (or more likely get washed away in a flood, where I
| live) and be irrecoverable, so they require you have the
| home insured. They care naught for contents insurance,
| just the house/building.
| jstanley wrote:
| But if they're the ones that want the building insured,
| it seems like it would be better for everyone if they're
| the ones that source the insurance.
| Peanuts99 wrote:
| Is it different in the US to the UK? Surely you own the
| house and have a liability on the mortgage?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| When we bought our house in the UK (a long time ago), it
| was a condition of the mortgage that we had buildings
| insurance. The theory is that if the house burns down or
| similar, the bank will want the rest of their money back
| and the house buyer is unlikely to be able to afford that
| considering that they needed a mortgage in the first
| place.
|
| It's basically the bank just outsourcing a lot of risk to
| the insurance company (via the house buyer).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Why would they go via the house buyer? They can insure
| the house themselves.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's common for the house buyer to want extra insurance
| (e.g. contents) whereas the bank is only interested in
| the house as a sellable structure, so it makes sense for
| the buyer to take on the insurance requirement (it's also
| less paperwork for the bank).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Insuring the contents of a home is routinely done as an
| entirely separate matter from insuring the structure. All
| renters have to do it that way. You can do it that way in
| a rent-to-own scheme too.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| You can do that in the US too. As well the banks won't
| like it, so what they'll do is protect their assets with
| force-placed insurance that you pay a hefty premium for.
|
| A quick google suggests a similar situation in that
| there's no legal mandate but most lenders in NZ require
| insurance.
| robocat wrote:
| You are right that you can get away with it in NZ.
|
| For total loss then bankruptcy might save you money
| (assuming you have no other assets or kiwisaver; since
| you still owe the debt).
|
| But part of the contract with the bank is allowing the
| bank and insurance company to verify/update.
|
| If you cancel your insurance, the insurance company is
| incentivised to tell the bank since you will probably
| sign up for insurance again when told to by the bank. I
| don't believe the banks or insurance have push updates. I
| would guess banks batch check if insurance is still live
| annually?
|
| I live in Christchurch and I believe insurance is
| valuable risk management - plenty of people gambled and
| lost with Earthquakes. That said: I own an as-is house
| because I bought a 3 bedroom on 800m2 for $190000 (cheap
| because you can't get a mortgage for it because it is
| _uninsurable_ due to subsidence - I only paid land
| price).
| bell-cot wrote:
| (For those unfamiliar - $190000 New Zealand is roughly
| $106,000 US, and 800m2 is about 1/5 acre. I know neither
| Christchurch real estate nor its geology - but obviously
| that 1/5 acre carries a big "will it keep subsiding?"
| caveat.)
| hnburnsy wrote:
| What did you do for liability insurance?
| CalRobert wrote:
| For the first year I had a policy similar to what farmers
| use for ag land, then it got cancelled and I was
| uninsured, which wasn't ideal.
|
| I sold the house after a while, it was an interesting
| experiment in cheap living but ultimately it wasn't
| great.
|
| Annoyingly I couldn't insure it because it was thatched,
| and I couldn't change the roof because of heritage. The
| Irish government has screwed over thatch owners brutally.
| ahupp wrote:
| The big risk that we need regulation for is not that
| insurance charges too much, but too little. There will
| always be the temptation to charge less than the other guy,
| get lots of customers and hope nothing really bad happens.
| cloverich wrote:
| This is a great callout, although I suspect the two main
| things insurers need but can't get today, due to
| regulations: 1. Ability to raise price
| based on risk. Regulation example: State won't let
| insurance company modify their fire risk maps. I believe
| this has come up in central Oregon for example.
| 2. Ability to drop people out right. i.e. if they think
| risk of home insurance is 50/50 next 10 years, they won't
| insure at all.
|
| 1 can accommodate for 2, but then its basically insurer
| charging the actual price of the home, year one. Maybe
| they can work out a deal though, like you get the money
| back if it doesn't burn down. (Mostly parroting things
| I've heard that seems to make sense).
| devman0 wrote:
| P&C insurance is a pretty competitive industry, and there
| are plenty of mutual insurance companies in the P&C
| business that don't have a price gouging incentive. Most of
| the regulations that are about reducing counterparty risk
| for the insured are probably necessary, but price controls
| are not, and generally, they only distort the market.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Can you define "price gouging"?
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Insurance (at least the kind we are talking about) is only
| mandatory if you have loans, and even then it is not 100%
| mandated. We do need insurance regulations, but price caps
| limit what things actually make sense to cover. To put it
| another way, you are free to buy land in a risky area if
| you want, but nobody has to insure it or loan you money for
| it. If you find someone who will loan you the money if you
| can get insurance, then you can't get insurance, that sucks
| for you but nobody owes it to you to hand over money on a
| losing investment. These requirements can be abused, but
| there really isn't much evidence of insurers, lenders, and
| investors colluding to rip people off.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as everyone
| else. So the cinder block home owner is subsidizing the
| sticks houses.
|
| Same happens in autos. Monitored safe driving nets at most
| 10-20% discounts. Biggest factor is age, and even then,
| difference between 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%.
|
| There are no tricks or deals to insurance.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > Biggest factor is age, and even then, difference between
| 20yo and 35yo driver is 38%.
|
| That's because age is both observable and strongly
| predictive of risk.
| 15155 wrote:
| Try and extend this logic to other highly correlative,
| immutable individual factors.
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| This is more a matter of market rules than an inherent
| property of insurance; currently we do not let insurers get
| sufficiently granular due to some assumptions about wider
| social benefits of a less individualised system.
|
| This might be reworked to allow for fire resistant designs
| to be a factor.
| chii wrote:
| > Resistant homes will pay nearly the same prices as
| everyone else.
|
| but this means the insurance company is mispricing (or is
| being forced to misprice) the risk of resistant homes.
|
| In theory, when correct pricing happens, these resistant
| homes should face less claims, and thus the premiums paid
| on them is high profit margin; ala, the customer is a good
| one, and the insurer should persue this customer more than
| another. This ought to results in a discount for said
| customer's premium, as more insurers vie for this customer
| over another.
| creato wrote:
| This does happen, it's just done at neighborhood level.
| That makes some sense, the biggest fire risk factor for
| your house is probably your neighbor's house burning
| down.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would actually guess that biggest risk is internal.
| Either faulty wiring, appliance or simple user error in
| kitchen or with live fire. Entire neighbourhoods burning
| in general is rare event.
| consp wrote:
| Don't know about the us but here we have fire breaks
| everywhere in the form of low depth waterways (non
| navigable). They also act as backup water reserves when
| the mains runs dry. So by design only parts of the
| neighborhood will burn down.
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| Yep, those exist across the western US too. I think many
| people are underestimating the scale and intensity of the
| winds California experienced. A single house on fire with
| relatively regular weather conditions isn't likely to
| spread to others - despite the "ha American houses dumb
| and wood" sentiment on this topic, there are building
| codes and fire safety is absolutely considered. But the
| Santa Ana winds are extremely dry and extremely powerful.
|
| It's a hard engineering problem to solve, but an
| increasingly urgent one now that these major events are
| becoming more intense and frequent.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I kinda figured it was self-destructive arson (detected
| or undetected) or gross negligence, and I'm mostly paying
| for those.
|
| Similar to when I look at causes of death for my age
| group and can pretty much eliminate the top 2 of 3 causes
| for myself.
| mikewarot wrote:
| It was only a week or so ago that I learned that a major
| failure mode of most houses in Florida during Hurricane
| season used to be the roofs ripping off. The tie plates and
| straps that were invented to solve that problem created the
| McMansion as a side effect.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oIeLGkSCMA
| cutemonster wrote:
| Interesting video, didn't know about truss plates
| rondini wrote:
| Let's just consider Los Angeles for a second. For decades
| working class immigrants were pushed to the foothills in
| Altadena by redlining policies which placed them at risk for
| wildfires. Today their risk is exponentially greater due to
| the effects of unchecked climate change, and many cannot
| afford insurance even now.
|
| How exactly do you expect these people to adapt? Many live in
| multigenerational households and could never afford to
| rebuild their house or move without uprooting their
| communities to another state.
|
| Why are the victims made to adapt to the atrocious actions of
| the wealthy and powerful? Maybe our policy discussions should
| start from a place of compassion and work towards solutions
| from there.
| mempko wrote:
| People don't understand the exponential change. As you
| correctly stated, the effects of climate change are
| exponential. Why? Because if you take a normal distribution
| and shift it linearly, the area on the edges grows
| exponentially. This is why even a linear shift in
| temperature can lead to an exponential rise in disasters.
|
| Math is hard for people, even on HN.
| scottLobster wrote:
| One of my daughters was born with moderate to severe
| autism. There's no obvious cause. I'm told that from what
| we know it's at least 10 different factors that go into it,
| one of which is environmental pollution. So maybe
| corporations are partially at fault.
|
| If I could cure it (yes, I'm using that term. It's a
| debilitating condition and she'd be better off without it)
| by selling my house and moving hundreds of miles away from
| family I'd do that in a heartbeat without complaint. All we
| can do is make the best of things.
| altairprime wrote:
| Note that brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked
| wildfires; think 'explosive fiery-hot shrapnel' rather than
| just catching on fire like wood.
|
| (This is not a contradiction of your point, just a useful
| related factoid for the modern era.)
| chmod775 wrote:
| You're going to die if you're around to witness either (if
| you didn't already pass out from smoke/heat/lack of oxygen).
| It literally doesn't matter.
|
| The advantage of suburbs in which houses are mostly built
| from non-flammable materials is that while maybe one or two
| rows of houses closest to forested areas will likely burn
| out, there won't be enough calorific potential for the fire
| to propagate further into the suburb.
|
| Also for firefighting efforts the difference between a house
| burning out and a house burning down is huge. The former
| means that most of the fire is already contained in a non-
| flammable structure, reducing the risk of spreading and also
| making efforts to quench it with water more effective.
|
| "Brick is much worse than wood for wind-stoked wildfires" is
| a strange take. If a wildfire is approaching, I'll take a
| town built from brick rather than plywood any day.
| altairprime wrote:
| Brick does tend to survive. Brick as an insulating layer
| can save lives. Brick also explodes violently under
| conditions where wood merely burns. Neither of these save
| homes in our wildfires, though; it turns out what saves
| homes is things no one realized at first:
|
| Don't plant trees within fifty feet of a structure. More,
| if you didn't inflate your home like a balloon to fill a
| property to the brim with home. Cut them down and make a
| firebreak. Clearings exist for a real and serious reason.
| Aesthetics have been given precedence far too long in this
| regard.
|
| Make your home airtight (or positively pressurize it, if
| you have the power and tech to do that safely) so that
| embers don't get pushed in by the winds and pulled in by
| the temperature differential currents and catch your house
| on fire from inside its walls. Not much fun in having a
| brick building burned out from embers that were forced in
| through a poorly-sealed door.
|
| Saturate your roof with water, so that it doesn't trap
| embers and act as a fire repeater to the next house on the
| block. Not only will your roof not burn, but every ember
| that lands on it will likely go out. Even if your roof is
| metal, consider installing sprinklers anyways. Maybe you'll
| help save your neighborhood someday.
|
| It's not the building material that's the one problem here;
| it's the carelessness of building code, safety enforcement
| and absence of federal and state aid to fireproof homes in
| known fire zones. It's the catastrophically incorrect
| hundred year old policy that would rather burn down a chunk
| of homes every ten years rather than admit that policy is
| wrong and that the indigenous people were right all along.
| Brick or wood or concrete or steel, none of these will stop
| the hottest fires with any certainty. We know what does,
| and we've allowed it to become unsafe to have wood homes.
| We know how to stop these wildfires. Build with brick if
| you like, but:
|
| Only _fire_ can prevent forest fires.
| rapsey wrote:
| Wind-stoked wildfires are not cat4 or something tornadoes.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Think about what you've just written... you're saying that a
| stone building is less safe than a wood building in a fire.
|
| Have we seen any stone cities burn down lately? Because I
| haven't seen London burn down since they replaced all the
| wooden houses with brick in 1666.
| HPsquared wrote:
| WW2 saw urban firestorms in European cities built of brick.
| The insides are still flammable.
| megaman821 wrote:
| I am not sure the wood framing matters much in this case.
| The fires are burning houses because the roofs are
| flammable, or embers are getting in the house through the
| eaves or a broken window. So in the end you have a
| completely burned down wood-framed house or a hollow
| concrete house that is no longer structurally safe.
| asciimov wrote:
| When I briefly lived in Oklahoma I found it frustrating that
| they use stick frame construction for homes and apartment
| buildings. Even when we know how to build much safer wind
| resistant houses.
|
| What I thought was worse was once a tornado rips up a
| neighborhood builders are allowed to build replacement stick
| framed homes.
| junto wrote:
| And I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down.
|
| Genuine question. Does this story get told to children in
| Oklahoma, and if so, don't the children think to themselves
| "wtf parents, have you seen our house?".
| oefnak wrote:
| Yes, as a European I'm always confused about what Americans
| think is the moral of that story..
| mfro wrote:
| Oklahoma is full of lowest bidder builders. Living in OK I
| rarely see a house built in the last 10 years that looks like
| it was built to last. Yet another thing Americans don't seem
| to care about anymore.
| hb-robo wrote:
| More like can't care about anymore. Median household income
| is 63k in OK and housing costs are through the
| stratosphere, it's no wonder people will pick any home over
| none.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Much more practical solution is more aggressive defensible
| spaces, cracking down on gardens, and proper management of fire
| reservoirs
| NoPicklez wrote:
| 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.
| _tariky wrote:
| 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 their impact in the future. As
| a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans prioritize building
| cheap homes over constructing better and more resilient ones.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Why bother building a better home when it's cheaper to buy
| insurance and rebuild later?
|
| This is why prices are important - sometimes it's sensible to
| build cheaper houses without these safeties if the risk isn't
| there, but if the risk does exist then it needs to be priced
| right to provide that incentive.
| miohtama wrote:
| Maybe be there is no longer "cheap" and that's the issue
| fishstock25 wrote:
| I don't understand the downvote. I think this hit the
| nail on its head.
|
| People whine about insurances pulling out. All they want
| is for somebody else to pay for their risk. It's their
| choice to live in that area, they should bear the
| consequences. It's not like it is or has ever been a
| secret. Climate change is known for decades now. Many
| people just chose not to "believe" in it. Well, their
| choice, but now that sh* hits the fan, they shouldn't
| come whine that everything gets sprayed with poo.
| pestaa wrote:
| But this cuts both ways. The insurers chose to provide
| their services in the area for the amount of money agreed
| upon. If anyone was more aware of the risks and
| probabilities, it's them.
|
| Why do they get to pull out now when it's time to hold
| their end of the contract?
| fishstock25 wrote:
| That depends on what you mean with "pull out". Typically
| you pay a premium and that means you are insured for a
| certain period. A year or so.
|
| Everybody who is insured at the moment of course needs to
| be paid by the insurance under the terms they had agreed
| to. The insurances should not be allowed to "pull out" of
| this responsibility.
|
| But what about the next year? If no insurance wants to
| offer you another term, especially not for those same
| conditions, then it's their choice to "pull out" in that
| sense.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| On the other hand, suddenly not offering cover at all is
| a problem for people who have established interests in a
| property.
|
| I can see an argument for not writing new policies in an
| area. But I can also make an argument for allowing
| existing policyholders to renew -- maybe not at the
| previous rate, but at an appropriate rate for the risk.
|
| As a matter of public policy, we ought to match the risk
| put on a homeowner with a mortgage by the bank with the
| risk assumed by the insurer when the homeowner pays their
| policies. Not let the insurance company lay the risk on
| the homeowner if they notice the risk has gone up before
| the loss is realised.
|
| Alternatively, we need to start treating buildings
| insurance more like (UK) life cover: I took out
| decreasing life insurance when I took out my mortgage,
| it'll pay off the mortgage if I die. The amount of cover
| goes down every year to roughly match me paying off my
| mortgage. No matter what happens to my health in the
| meantime, if I keep paying the premiums then I keep the
| cover -- even if I wouldn't qualify for new cover.
|
| Or maybe we need to say that if an insurance company
| declines to renew because they think the risk has risen
| too much, the customer should be allowed to claim on the
| expiring policy even if the house is still standing,
| because it's obviously worthless, and it's obviously due
| to a risk that was covered by the policy.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| If you want a longer reinsurance term, it needed to be
| agreed to upfront. I'd guess insurance companies are well
| aware of the risks of writing long-term policies and so
| don't usually offer them. That being said, your
| comparison to term life insurance is quite apt - I wonder
| if such insurance policies actually exist. I would guess
| they'd cost more than a yearly renewing policy, but who
| knows.
|
| Your other proposals as extensions to yearly terms
| certainly go too far. Annual renewal policies are
| commonplace, and it should be well understood that
| there's no obligation on any party to continue it.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Oh, definitely. At least not without a lot of discussion
| around how much the extra insurance would have cost. I'm
| not in a position to implement it either :).
|
| If we're going to have state intervention though (and it
| seems at least under suggestion, I've no idea how
| seriously, in CA) then rather than an insurer of last
| resort, we (or rather _they_ ) should consider what they
| actually want from their insurance.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There are specialty insurance companies that will
| underwrite almost anything, for any duration, for a high
| enough fee.
|
| But if the state regulator sets a maximum cap they
| wouldn't be allowed to...
| SirMaster wrote:
| California law limits how high the insurance companies
| can charge for premiums. Did that law or those limits
| exist when they started offering coverage in the area?
|
| Maybe they didn't, and then the law or limits were
| imposed at a time when the insurance companies needed to
| increase the premiums to match the new risk. But if the
| law prevents them, then they have no other choice but to
| pull out. Why would they as a business stay if the risk
| is to great for the premiums they are allowed to charge?
| They certainly are not obligated to stay.
| mvc wrote:
| Please do let me know where I can live that is guaranteed
| to be safe from unexpected natural disaster.
| fishstock25 wrote:
| In your mind, probably.
|
| More seriously, nowhere of course, but if the risk is
| manageable (a fluffy term to mean predictable and not too
| high) then you'll find an insurance that covers you.
| Those natural conditions are dynamic though, so where
| such insurance is available can be (and is) subject to
| change. Predictably so. Nobody will provide you with the
| same car insurance when your car is new compared to 40
| years later (same car). Things change. If you don't want
| your insurance to change, negotiate a 40-year term.
| Forcing them is nuts.
| consp wrote:
| Only you also take into account your cheap home will likely
| accelerate the problem. Which never happens.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| How about the cost of your _life_? If the house resists the
| earthquake and you are _inside_ it, you don 't die.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Building to protect occupants and building to make the
| structure salvageable afterwards may be two different
| goals. Think crumple zones in cars.
| earnestinger wrote:
| Nice point. Still, in wast majority of cases, house keeps
| standing -> habitant survival chance goes up.
|
| Cars being on the move, makes that distinction much much
| more relevant
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| For inhabitant survival a sifficient goal is something
| like "remains structurally intact for ~30 minutes after
| the end of the earthquake". Which is significantly leas
| than is required for staying habitable
| earnestinger wrote:
| Makes sense.
|
| I was fixating on the opposition of goals in the car (if
| car doesn't bend/deform, then death risk increases).
| llm_trw wrote:
| Where is the crumple zone in the burned out buildings in
| California?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Evacuation. Hardly anyone died in these fires.
| llm_trw wrote:
| That's traffic lights, not crumple zones.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| This is not a good analogy.
|
| Crumple zones in cars exist under the assumption that
| they will not be occupied by humans. In a house, on the
| other hand, any place could have a person inside of it
| during an earthquake, meaning that basically the entire
| house would need to stand to avoid any human being hurt.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm not an architect and don't live in an earthquake
| zone, but I was under the impression that wooden homes
| flex in earthquakes and if and when they do fall on you,
| do less damage than concrete homes which are stiff up
| until a point and then crack and fall.
|
| So the human surviving may come at the cost of more
| houses collapsing.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| Can personally confirm. Wooden houses do flex and often
| survive unscathed. The only major damage is usually due
| to any masonry attached to the house (see: chimney) or
| the house moving off of the foundation (see: before ties
| were in the building code).
| wiredfool wrote:
| It absolutely happens in steel and concrete construction
| in earthquake loading, when loading past the smaller
| earthquakes.
|
| Plastic/non-linear deformation is intended in shear
| panels of steel connections and the core of well confined
| concrete beams/columns. The idea is to provide a lot of
| energy damping due to the nonlinear nature of the f*D
| hysteresis curve. This works long enough for the
| earthquake to go away and the people to get out of the
| building, at which point, you need a new building but
| hopefully no one has died.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| We were speaking in the context of fires previously - in
| which case it's usually more about preserving the
| neighbourhood and land than anything else, you have to
| evacuate regardless.
|
| Earthquakes are different and you'd need a house that
| stood anyway (though I'd guess most houses don't have a
| problem with earthquakes insofar as not collapsing on
| inhabitants, though they'd probably be damaged)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Loss of life from fire and earthquake isnt really high
| enough to be a concern. This is primarily a cost and
| inconvenience question.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Maybe people don't like to restart their lives like that if
| it's avoidable, even if it costs more.
| vasco wrote:
| The key thing to understand is that you don't get to choose
| when the house gets destroyed or get advanced notice. Which
| means you might be in there, or your kids, or all your
| belongings. But yes, after you're dead in the rubble
| someone else can rebuild your house and it might be
| cheaper.
| yurishimo wrote:
| There's not much rubble for a house made of wood!
| michaelt wrote:
| These wildfires produce surprisingly few deaths.
|
| Did you know the most destructive wildfire in California
| history, the 2018 Camp Fire, destroyed 19,000 buildings
| but only caused 85 deaths? [1]
|
| [1] https://oehha.ca.gov/sites/default/files/media/downlo
| ads/cli...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Yes of course, but everything in life is a risk trade
| off. Presumably the person you're replying to understands
| that.
| thisoneworks wrote:
| Hah financialization strikes again. Try explaining this to
| a person from a third world country, they would say "what
| are you talking about". Also they would have better health
| care than your average American.
| Theodores wrote:
| In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that
| some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely
| from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet.
|
| If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the
| roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up
| past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the
| building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the
| footprint of the building rather than let it 'slide off' to
| set fire to the property on the other side of the street.
|
| The parapet requirement did not extend to towns outside
| London, which makes me wonder why.
|
| The answer to that is to see what goes on in the USA. After a
| natural disaster they just pick themselves up and keep going.
| Florida was obliterated in 2024 but nobody cared after a
| fortnight. Same with the current wild fires, nobody will care
| next week, it will be forgotten, even though having one's
| home destroyed might be considered deeply traumatic.
|
| I think that the key to change is to not have too many
| natural disasters, ideally nobody has living memory of the
| last fire/flood/earthquake/pandemic/alien invasion/plague of
| locusts so that there is no point of reference or 'compassion
| fatigue'. Only then can there be a fair expectation of
| political will and the possibility of change.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| > ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...]
|
| Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people
| forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat
| them.
|
| Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people
| today have never come across an iron lung, which is a
| testament to medical technology, but it means some silly
| opinions get way more traction than they should.
|
| "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
| it" - George Santayana
| Theodores wrote:
| Yours is an interesting point as I am now questioning:
|
| > "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
| repeat it" - George Santayana
|
| I have expressed that idea with different attribution
| before now, but, on reflection, it is a 'trite quote'
| that can be trotted out far too easily!
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Florida was obliterated in 2024
|
| That's an huge exaggeration. FL was not obliterated in
| 2024.
|
| Stats:
|
| Total storms 18
|
| Hurricanes 11
|
| Major hurricanes (Cat. 3+) 5
|
| Total fatalities 401
|
| Total damage $128.072 billion
|
| (Third-costliest tropical cyclone season on record)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The weird part of living near the tropics is we all look
| at that and go "not too bad a hurricane season". Everyone
| not-from-the-tropics stares at your list in horror.
| Theodores wrote:
| I forgot that any exaggeration is not allowed on HN!
|
| 128 billion dollars is equivalent to 200,000 homes, or
| even more, which does not represent total obliteration,
| however, if that level of devastation happened in the UK,
| the only comparison would be what the Luftwaffe did
| during WW2.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > 128 billion dollars is equivalent to 200,000 homes, or
| even more, which does not represent total obliteration,
|
| As of 2023, FL has over 10.4 million homes.
|
| > however, if that level of devastation happened in the
| UK, the only comparison would be what the Luftwaffe did
| during WW2.
|
| If you are referring to The Blitz, the numbers I have
| access to is that over 1.1 million homes and flats were
| destroyed in London alone.
| Theodores wrote:
| Those 1.1 million homes were destroyed over a period of
| years, not days.
| addicted wrote:
| That damage is like 10% of Florida's GDP.
|
| That's absolutely nuts.
|
| It's also a lot worse than the pure numbers suggest
| because the damage here is taking away actual built up
| stock, so capacity for generating future GDP. And the GDP
| in Florida includes a lot of economic activity used to
| rebuild after past damage.
|
| And all of this without Miami even being flooded out of
| existence. Miami can't even build dikes due to the porous
| ground it's built on.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, I'm surprised that the damages of the LA fire occurred,
| because it was known beforehand that California had a fire
| problem (and also have an earthquake problem I think).
|
| I'm here in Eastern Europe and our buildings can withstand a
| lot of things.
|
| > we need to take action to mitigate their impact in the
| future. As a foreigner, it seems to me that Americans
| prioritize building cheap homes over constructing better and
| more resilient ones.
|
| As an European, it baffles me as well.
|
| If this doesn't happen to "cheap" homes here, why does it
| happen in California, to rich people's houses?
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| The government banned insurance companies from raising
| prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a
| while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance
| companies stopped offering insurance.
|
| When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen
| people die.
| areoform wrote:
| > Gov. Gavin Newsom just released part of his solution to
| California's home insurance crisis, and it boils down to
| a push to allow carriers to move faster to raise rates.
|
| > In most cases, the Department of Insurance would be
| required to act on an insurance carrier's rate request
| within 60 days, unless extensions are necessary.
|
| > The proposed bill expedites the timelines laid out in
| Proposition 103, which requires insurance companies to
| have changes approved by the Department of Insurance and
| dictates how quickly the department must act on change
| requests.
|
| > Critics fear that shortening approval timelines will
| allow insurance companies to jack-up premiums without
| room for public appeals and sufficient review by the
| Department of Insurance.
|
| https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/30/california-insurance-
| crisi...
| fishstock25 wrote:
| > The government banned insurance companies from raising
| prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a
| while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance
| companies stopped offering insurance.
|
| Obviously. Such a move by the government is just plain
| stupid.
|
| > When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters
| happen people die.
|
| No need to overgeneralize. Not every stupid move is
| immediately "socialism" and everything smart is
| "capitalism". It's obvious to every socialist that this
| move was stupid. In contrast, it's pretty clear that a
| purely market-based health system costs lives. Nobody is
| claiming though that "whenever societies dabble in
| capitalism it results in deaths". Pick your optimization
| target and then the right tool to reach that target.
| Sometimes that tool is to let prices regulate risk,
| sometimes it is laws to regulate risk, and sometimes it's
| something else entirely.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > it's pretty clear that a purely market-based health
| system costs lives.
|
| That was literally the take about insurance. And here we
| are, again.
| BoxFour wrote:
| > It's obvious to every socialist that this move was
| stupid
|
| Is it? Or is this post hoc rationalization? I really
| dislike playing the "both sides" card, even for a moment,
| but it's hard to deny that there are questionable takes
| on both ends.
|
| I agree with you that not every regulation equates to
| socialism, and it's ridiculous to claim it is. However,
| the narrative of "insurance companies bad" is incredibly
| prevalent among left-leaning perspectives, and _any_
| regulation around insurance premiums tends to be
| automatically celebrated as a clear victory.
|
| Ironically (because it's a free market argument), it's a
| not-uncommon argument that if insurance companies can't
| provide their services for no more than some arbitrarily-
| decided amount annually, they're being inefficient or
| greedy and should go bankrupt and let a new competitor
| take the market.
| fishstock25 wrote:
| > the narrative of "insurance companies bad" is
| incredibly prevalent among left-leaning perspectives,
|
| Perhaps it is, I don't have enough insight to know. It's
| obvious (to me) that this is clearly over-simplifying
| things.
|
| > Ironically (because it's a free market argument), it's
| a not-uncommon argument that if insurance companies can't
| provide their services for no more than some arbitrarily-
| decided amount annually, they're being inefficient or
| greedy and should go bankrupt and let a new competitor
| take the market.
|
| Is it actually a free market argument? Maybe it's not
| possible to provide that service at that price point. I'd
| think that the free market argument is that the price is
| already as low as possible, otherwise such a competitor
| would already exist and have outcompeted everybody. Such
| an argument has other issues though, like inertia,
| scaling effects, price-fixing and such, all of which are
| working against a free market though. Which is why a
| truly free market needs regulation, otherwise it ceases
| to be free.
|
| > I really dislike playing the "both sides" card, even
| for a moment
|
| Honest question: Why? I've found that reality is
| complicated. It's rare to find saints on "one side" and
| "pure evil" on the other. The truth is often times that
| there are many issues, many interests, many world views,
| and typically even more than two sides. Uncovering the
| truth usually requires avoiding partisanship and have an
| open mind about understanding the interests of every
| involved party. That necessarily leads to "both sides"
| arguments. Not common in hyper-polarized discourses,
| unfortunately.
| frankvdwaal wrote:
| Ah yes. Socialism is when intervention and subsidies.
| tormeh wrote:
| Pretty much, yeah:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| The fire problem can be managed by burning or removing some
| of the dead wood, and building adequate water storage.
| Apparently California has been neglecting those two
| problems for decades.
| lionkor wrote:
| It could also be helped by not building houses out of
| cardboard.
|
| The amount of walls in Europe that you could punch a wall
| into is low enough that you shouldnt try.
| robocat wrote:
| And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and they
| would fall down.
|
| I'm in Christchurch, 6.2 Earthquake in 2011 and wooden
| framed houses dealt with it pretty good - they flex -
| lots of the houses survived and are still used.
|
| Just about anything old and bricky was a deathtrap
| (fortunately many were unoccupied because condemned after
| nearby 2010 Earthquake).
| lionkor wrote:
| > And give many of Europe's house's a small rattle and
| they would fall down.
|
| In areas where we don't have earthquakes, yeah, what's
| the problem?
| overflow897 wrote:
| I think the problem is suggest that an earthquake zone's
| fire problems would be solved by building houses like
| they do in a non-earthquake zone
| fakedang wrote:
| And considering most of Europe is basically low risk
| territory, it makes sense?
|
| Afaik, only Turkey and a small part of the Balkans is
| considered earthquake territory. And there's no fracking
| in Europe to induce minor manmade earthquakes either.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Some parts of Italy are at earthquake risk
| https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-
| risk-i...
|
| Despite being hit by earthquakes more often than other
| parts of Europe, usually only buildings and houses not
| built up to standard or old ones crumble, other buildings
| just shake and that's it. Of course, I do not know the
| exact risk of earthquakes in California and their
| intensity, but it's definitely possible to build
| earthquake resistant brick buildings
| jyounker wrote:
| My first night in Switzerland there has a 5+ earthquake.
| johnisgood wrote:
| We had some earthquakes before, I was on the 10th level,
| you could feel the house "flex" in a way. Nothing
| happened and it's been standing there since Soviet Union
| or longer (obviously with maintenance).
|
| We don't get many earthquakes here though, we do get
| storm but it doesn't cause power outage at all.
| hbarka wrote:
| Frankly, this is just an ignorant take. Put Twitter/Elon
| Musk down for a bit. The Palisades Fire was not a forest
| fire. Please dispel your myths and learn what 60-80 mph
| winds, sometimes 100 mph gusts, can do.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| While having above ground power lines
|
| While having unmanaged accumulated flammable brush
|
| While having an empty reservoir under repair
|
| While having the public water source unable to maintain
| water pressure for multiple hydrant usage
|
| While having too few fire fighters dispatched in the area
| anyway
|
| While having houses made out of wood
|
| is it an ignorant take when the houses not made out of
| wood with their own watersource _were_ able to withstand
| 100mph wind gusts and firestorm? it really _really_ makes
| everyone else look ignorant
| hbarka wrote:
| Peak internet right here. I'm out
| EraYaN wrote:
| All of those are a result of American's favorite hobby
| though, not maintaining infrastructure, because ooh no
| taxes. LA has not raised enough revenue for decades it
| seems. The amount of pot holes in even the most expensive
| neighborhoods was already to damn high.
|
| At some point the US really needs to do bit of cultural
| reform so they can start paying for all that low density
| development and the costs associated with it. So stuff
| can actually be maintained.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| LA and California as a whole have some of the highest
| taxes in the nation, along with the most mild climate.
| The amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in California is
| stunning. The problem is mismanagement above all, not a
| lack of funds (at least in this case).
| Mr-Frog wrote:
| > LA and California as a whole have some of the highest
| taxes in the nation
|
| The City of LA has a lower per capita tax revenue than
| most large Texan and southern cities, largely due to
| property tax caps.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Frankly, everyone has been warning about the risk for
| years. The fire started as a forest fire (whether it was
| arson or not), and was anticipated by insurance companies
| who dropped policies on thousands of people in the months
| leading up to this. The winds are a big problem of
| course, but if there were not so many acres of kindling
| around the city along with insufficient water reservoirs,
| then a fire like this could not spread as easily as it
| did. I will give you that the fire could have still
| happened and been bad either way, but insurance people
| who literally study this stuff for a living and have skin
| in the game knew it was likely to get out of control well
| in advance.
| jyounker wrote:
| The problem is the houses.
|
| In lots of pictures from LA, there are green trees right
| beside burned out houses. The video in this NYT article
| is a great example:
| https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/15/us/los-angeles-
| wildf...
|
| One of the biggest problems are vents in the eves.
| Typically these vents have a single screen with a coarse
| mesh. Embers from fires easily pass through these vents,
| land on a surface, and start a fire.
|
| Replacing the one coarse mesh with two or more layers of
| fine mesh significantly reduces the odds of an ember
| getting into the house.
|
| This is a trivial improvement that dramatically increases
| survivability.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| The real problem is the FIRE. The houses could be made
| fire-resistant, but making houses to be fire-resistant is
| going to be more expensive than managing the forests to
| reduce wildfires and storing more water. I don't believe
| that a tiny screen is going to make this huge difference
| you think it is. These fires are HOT and don't just catch
| houses on fire with little embers. They are hot enough to
| set wood and plastic on fire from a pretty good distance
| away. Green trees don't easily burn because of their high
| water content. Trees have evolved to survive fires as
| well.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| All the properties that survived in those LA neighborhoods
| all had some pretty basic and intentional fire resistance
|
| I'm curious about how many others did that burned down too
|
| But so far the ones highlighted had super obvious
| mitigations that its astounding to see were not more common
| euroderf wrote:
| > Americans prioritize building cheap homes over constructing
| better and more resilient ones.
|
| It's all considered disposable, much like strip malls.
| willvarfar wrote:
| (Recently there was a major public building collapse in
| Serbia: the porch of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed,
| killing 15 people. This has really focused attention on
| corruption and caused massive protests.)
| trinix912 wrote:
| What collapsed was the newly rebuilt part of the porch, not
| the old one built to those codes. It has nothing to do with
| insufficient building codes, hence a corruption scandal.
| grujicd wrote:
| Not really. Old concrete cannopy collapsed. It was
| minimally modified as part of station reconstruction by
| adding some glass panels, but cannopy itself and its
| suspension beams were not rebuilt. It's not clear at this
| point whether this modification was responsible for
| collapse, but what is clear is that old cannopy and beams
| were not even inspected during this renovation. That's a
| major blunder which lead to loss of 15 lives, and main
| reason for that is systematic corruption where minimal
| work is performed while full price is billed by private
| companies close to rulling party.
| spicyusername wrote:
| The problem always becomes, who is going to pay for that
| action.
| arp242 wrote:
| Reading up on this a bit, it seems it was the 1963 earthquake
| that precipitated the change in building regulations? The
| 1969 one seemed comparatively mild(?)
| scarab92 wrote:
| Wood for earthquake resistance vs masonry for fire resistance
| seems like a false dichotomy.
|
| Australia has a lot of experience with building fire resistant
| homes, and they didn't do it with masonry, they did it with
| timber and steel framed homes, plus fireproof cladding and
| roofing materials, keeping a perimeter free of vegetation and
| protecting against ember ingress.
|
| It is possible to have both earthquake and fire resistance in a
| stick framed home, without the expense of resorting to
| reinforced concrete.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| California's building codes are the same. Three problems:
| overhaul takes generations, monster fire storms will still
| burn resistant materials, and brush upkeep is difficult
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Australia is surprisingly urban, especially in terms of I
| would guess 90%+ of people live in relatively safe places
| fire wise (putting inhalation of particles aside).
|
| People in built up areas almost don't think at all about
| wildfire safety, cladding an so on.
| mjevans wrote:
| More than just buildings.
|
| ZONING and Building Code need to change.
|
| You're correct that buildings must be more robust and literally
| capable of surviving an ongoing 4th of July event directly
| above the property.
|
| However they must also be built such that there is less which
| is able to burn. Also so that that which does burn is less
| deadly when it burns.
|
| There also need to be better firebreaks and less natural 'fuel
| load', which when there IS a good set of rain in the near
| future, needs to be burned in a rotating cycle to restore
| nature's fuel balance and discourage catastrophic uncontrolled
| correction events.
| john01dav wrote:
| I'm curious how the roof is constructed on your cinder block
| house. That kind of cinder block construction seems obviously
| superior to me, but I can't think of any roof that would be so
| obviously superior.
| HPsquared wrote:
| There are a LOT of fireproof roofing materials; the US is
| quite strange in covering most houses with these asphalt
| shingles. Clay/concrete tiles are pretty standard; slate or
| metal also options. There are presumably different ways of
| dealing with the gaps and ventilation to keep out embers.
| irrational wrote:
| We live in an ICF house. People don't realize it is "framed"
| with concrete instead of wood unless we tell them. Siding on
| the outside and drywall on the inside.
| throw310822 wrote:
| In northern Italy, the rebuilding of mountain villages in brick
| and stone after devastating fires had destroyed many of them
| was ordered _in the nineteenth century_. It 's absurd to claim
| you can't do anything against fires and the world has become
| uninsurable in the 21st century and in the world's richest
| country, while you keep building everything in the cheapest and
| lightest wood. The sight of the houses burned to the ground
| except for their fireplace and chimney in the middle is both
| sad and infuriating.
| gregwebs wrote:
| It seems some houses that focused on fire safety survived the
| fire with minimal damage.
|
| https://nypost.com/2025/01/15/real-estate/passive-house-surv...
|
| Metal roof, passive house so embers don't get sucked in.
| Concrete walls around the property and plants that don't
| contribute to the fire.
|
| The house might cost an additional $100k to build compared to
| conventional. But it would make all that back on energy,
| roofing, and insurance costs- probably at the point the
| conventional home would need a roof replacement.
|
| Builders don't build such houses unless a client or building
| code mandates it.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Other sources say the house wasn't a passive house but did
| have fire rated walls.
|
| It seems like a lot of fire resistance can be created just by
| focusing on defensible space and having a concrete or metal
| fence. Then protecting the roof ventilation from fire (there
| are special screening materials that can be bought). Then
| using class A rated materials on the roof and then the
| exterior. Then metal framed windows instead of vinyl.
| Actually doesn't cost that much more- they should require it
| in building codes in these areas. The issue then is retrofit-
| insurers should probably require a defensible space in these
| high risk areas.
|
| https://youtu.be/yZe-TlYxm9g?si=Uuqy6rhrhUb8l-_c
| lm28469 wrote:
| > The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without
| steel reinforcement.
|
| It's just a matter of throwing a couple hundreds $ of metal and
| cement every few rows of bricks, like this:
| https://www.pointp.fr/asset/27/07/AST212707-XL.jpg when you see
| how much american spend on houses it's a drop in the ocean.
|
| FYI a two storey 10x10m house will run you less than 10k euros
| in bricks for the external walls, and that's with 30cm wide
| honeycomb bricks which probably provide enough thermal
| insulation as is for LA. Add 10k of rockwool insulation and
| you're good to go for most places.
|
| You use wood for simple reasons: it's widely available, that's
| the only thing your workers are trained on, it's cheaper so
| builders make more money, it's faster and allow crazier design
| (mcmansions). Same thing for asphalt shingles, nobody uses
| that, it needs constant replacement, but it's cheaper,
| easier/faster to install.
|
| In europe we mostly build rectangles with simple two pitch
| roofs, ceramic tiles that last 50+ years, most of them are made
| of bricks, even in seismically active countries like Italy.
|
| Europe:
| https://www.philomag.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_...
|
| US: https://www.reviewjournal.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/10/950...
| goosejuice wrote:
| And skill, likely in low supply, and labor. I'm sure some in
| the Pacific Palisades could afford this no problem, but many
| in altadena inherited their homes and their homes were the
| majority of their net worth.
|
| Admittedly not very knowledgeable about this stuff but I feel
| like a lot of these types of comments are greatly
| trivializing this problem
| presentation wrote:
| Tokyo has high earthquake and moderately high fire risk, people
| here tend to go with steel reinforced concrete but wooden
| buildings remain common as well.
| giorgioz wrote:
| > brick isn't earthquake resistant
|
| This is an extreme that is not true. Bricks are harder to make
| earthquake resistant but it's perfectly possible to build
| houses that have SOME bricks in it that are also earthquake
| resistant. There are permutations of materials that are both
| more fire resistant and more earthquake resistant to the
| required level at a certain height of the building.
| goosejuice wrote:
| They clearly qualified it with "Not without steel
| reinforcement."
|
| Anyways the difference in labor costs between wood and
| reinforced brick would be massive in LA county not to mention
| the additional cost of materials.
| account266928 wrote:
| Relatedly, door locks sometimes seem to be "insurance rated",
| as in insurance companies give their opinion on what sort of
| lock one should use. If you couple that with the belief that no
| lock is 100% secure, it sort of suggests that a collaboration
| with insurance companies to decrease the odds they'll have to
| foot huge reconstruction bills (via stuff like you said,
| construction techniques, firefighting capacity, etc.) could
| alleviate this conflict somewhat.
| scoofy wrote:
| _When nerds like me were freaking out about climate change in
| 2003, what did people think we we're talking about?!?_
|
| This is the exact scenario every single scientist I studied under
| openly discussed: probably not an extinction level event, but
| very, _very_ expensive... Expensive to the point of it being
| cheaper in the long run to switch to renewables asap and hope for
| the best.
|
| It's like a 150M conservatives are all at once are saying "Wait a
| minute! We should do something about this!"
|
| Uh... yea, no shit.
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| Imho insurance is one of the most underrated problems in economic
| "science".
|
| Punks feelin lucky are advised to Google (or ask any GPT about)
| "insurance paradox".
|
| Haha
| luisfmh wrote:
| My only hope for climate change is that insurance companies start
| lobbying to have a more predictable environment since risk models
| works better when things aren't chaotic, and that gives a
| monetary incentice for companies to do better
| BeetleB wrote:
| Ouch - so this explains why my home insurance almost tripled in a
| year - and I don't live in an at-risk area. Everyone I know had
| huge premium increases.
| zaik wrote:
| Oh look, climate change does economic damage, but not at the
| source.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This is silly, and overcomplicating the issue. The world is very
| insurable, at a price. The property and casualty business is
| competitive as hell in almost all parts.
|
| The government needs to just stay out of it.
| csours wrote:
| Ok, just play the next move. Insurance is expensive. Now what
| happens.
| lionkor wrote:
| People don't build wood houses in an area that gets wild
| fires
| jopsen wrote:
| Probably they will, at one point maybe that banks wills
| stop financing it.
|
| But only when you can't get mortgages, people will begin to
| stop, and even then some will continue.
|
| It'll take a long time for these changes to trickle out.
| Especially, when real estate prices in LA are so high.
|
| It might be faster to fix this with zoning. Or if the area
| is so desirable, find a way to engineer your way out of it.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| We don't want fast fixes. Things change, building
| materials could change, fire fighting methods could
| improve etc. If we can send the right signal via the
| right price for the risk, people can react accordingly to
| either reduce or avoid the problem.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Can't think for yourself? This is econ 101. People will try
| to drive down the cost by:
|
| 1) Buying/building smaller houses that cost less to insure.
| 2) Building using different materials which are less prone to
| burn. 3) Moving to areas less prone to fires/hurricanes etc
| 4) Voting for representatives who take this more seriously
| and install better infrastructure to fight fires/floods.
|
| These are all good ideas which haven't been put in place
| already because the government has distorted the insurance
| market so badly people aren't getting the right price
| signals.
| csours wrote:
| > "The government needs to just stay out of it."
|
| 0) Elect people who claim they can make the voters'
| existing lifestyle affordable.
|
| I agree that sometimes nothing or not very much is the best
| thing for the government to do, but a crisis is a very bad
| time to say that, because the other side will just claim
| they will fix things.
|
| After all, deflation is not good, but claiming that you
| will bring down grocery prices does seem effective.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Sure - "politics is a tough game" is absolutely true.
| thrance wrote:
| When the cost of premium surpasses what people are able to pay,
| companies will just leave. That's the point of the article, you
| can only ignore material reality for so long.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The companies are leaving because of mandated price caps from
| the government. In every other market when cost > price and
| they can't control cost, companies increase price.
|
| You can only ignore the reality of government interference in
| the insurance market for so long.
| thrance wrote:
| I meant that at some point, with ever more costly and
| numerous disasters, the premium insurance companies would
| have to charge to be able to properly insure their clients
| would be too much for said clients to stomach, which would
| prevent anyone from getting anything insured. _This has
| nothing to do with government interference_. At some point
| the equation simply doesn 't work anymore.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It still won't cause that. People will own less expensive
| things if the _all in_ cost of owning them goes up. This
| is econ 101. People buy cheaper houses when interest
| rates go up and vice versa.
| RevEng wrote:
| Tell that to people who can't even afford rent. Some
| goods are inelastic because people need them at any
| price. Housing prices are good example of that. This is
| also econ 101.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Take econ 101 again. "some goods are inelastic" isn't
| even a coherent sentence. You are out of your depth.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Apparently climate change causes reductions in fire department
| funding, amirite?
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| 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..
| Throw8394958 wrote:
| So 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).
| lupinglade wrote:
| The 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.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| A number of those homes were old enough to qualify for social
| security. I doubt it's reasonable to believe developers could
| anticipate the environmental conditions that would befall a
| home some half-century since breaking ground.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I think the problem is less the materials used, and more that
| urban sprawl has pushed cities to build out into areas they
| shouldn't be building.
|
| Destroying the wetlands to build houses closer to the ocean has
| eliminated the natural hurricane protection (from storm surge,
| at least) that many low lying areas had.
|
| Building into fire-prone hills outside of cities in Southern
| California was never going to end well.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| What are we betting that the Americans rebuild in wood again? It
| seems like they never learn. We had a single city fire like this
| 500 years ago and since then we haven't... because we built the
| city back in brick instead of wood.
| ohazi wrote:
| Earthquakes.
|
| Options are wood again, or steel and concrete.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| Somehow, all these nations around the world with earthquakes
| still have their houses standing.
|
| Why is it always whataboutism with earthquakes when presented
| with "don't build houses out of matchsticks"?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Countries like Japan use the same construction techniques
| as the western US. Few countries have earthquakes as strong
| as the Pacific Rim, where M8-9+ are regular occurrences.
| Properly designed wood-framed houses will survive that.
|
| I've never seen a house in Europe that was engineered to
| the M8.5 earthquake standard that is mandatory where I live
| in the US. They used to construct houses like in Europe but
| they kept getting destroyed in earthquakes and were made
| illegal for safety reasons.
| locallost wrote:
| They do not have their houses standing. Look at the recent
| earthquake in Turkey and Syria. 60k dead and 150 billion in
| damage.
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| Where 500 years ago?
| lionkor wrote:
| Europe, a lot of cities went though a few large fires and
| then went " _facepalm_ oh!!! maybe we should try stone! "
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Americans used to build cities with brick and masonry. They
| were repeatedly destroyed by strong earthquakes, as would
| happen to your city if subject to similarly severe earthquakes.
| Americans paid for that lesson in blood.
|
| European houses are not designed to withstand American
| disasters. A brick house that can survive a M8.5 earthquake,
| which is the safety standard where I live, will be almost
| purely steel structurally and very expensive to build. The
| brick would be decorative, which can be (and is) done on a wood
| frame.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| I definitely understand what you are saying here, and it
| makes sense. But concrete is quite common in Europe these
| days, which I suspect would also be a good option for
| earthquake zones.
| throw310822 wrote:
| The entire south and south-east of Europe has a similar
| seismic risk to most of California, and wooden houses are
| nowhere to be seen.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| In LA a lot of non-mansions were destroyed but plenty of
| them were modest to reduce overall cost initially because
| the area has always been expensive to build or live in,
| even for the original homes to be put up.
|
| Then you have to consider how quickly development took
| place by comparison, and the collective degree of certainty
| among the original buyers on whether or not they would be
| able to afford to stay very long anyway.
|
| So many come there just to give California a try since it's
| supposed to be the golden state, who are depending
| completely on the occurrence of good fortune within a
| limited amount of time before they would expect to return
| to states with less-expensive hometowns in mostly less
| fire-prone environments.
|
| This would influence what kind of home they would expect to
| be suitable for their needs to begin with, and how long it
| might need to endure.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Concrete + rebar and then a steel roof secured with
| hurricane-proof metal straps, or just tile roofing if the
| area isn't hurricane prone. Concrete can also be used for
| things like insulated concrete forms (ICF) that save energy
| and improve insulation for both hot and cold.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Betteridges law of headlines. No. Silly article.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| This seems like more of a commentary on a general lack of
| understanding of basic economics.
|
| If things aren't priced correctly, mayhem ensues. Frustratingly
| the political solutions to high prices often just put off the
| problem. Government mandated price fixing, of insurance, rentals,
| etc never fixes the core problem, only allows it to fester.
|
| Sometimes it's taxpayers losing money, sometimes it's the few
| unlucky ones being forced by the government - and arguably the
| latter is worse for everyone as private investment and services
| dry up because of regulatory risks.
| manmal wrote:
| Naive question, but why not raise taxes in hazardous areas, and
| use that money for a state-run insurance?
| cbracketdash wrote:
| Naive answer, but I think this exists and is called the FAIR
| plan. See here: https://stateline.org/2025/01/16/california-
| fires-show-state...
| manmal wrote:
| That one doesn't discriminate by location I think?
| pontifier wrote:
| Insurance is such a crutch for some people, but it shouldn't be.
|
| If something is worth doing, it's worth doing whether you have
| insurance or not.
|
| In my opinion, the amount of resources spent on buying insurance
| would, in almost every case, be better spent on prevention rather
| than after the fact mitigation.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If something is worth doing, it's worth doing whether you
| have insurance or not.
|
| You're forgetting about insurance fraud.
| dottjt wrote:
| It's that "in almost every case" that's the problem. The whole
| point of insurance is to cover that case where it does happen,
| irrespective of how unlikely it is.
|
| Case in point, my partner was diagnosed with a very, very, very
| rare terminal cancer at 32. Insurance turned out to be a great
| investment for us.
| jopsen wrote:
| > If something is worth doing, it's worth doing whether you
| have insurance or not.
|
| Taking a mortgage that allows you to buy a house you'll pay off
| over 30 years and then sell when you retire requires insurance.
|
| Without insurance the investments we make in ours homes would
| need to be a lot smaller.
|
| I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it's not without
| significant impact.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| 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.
| etchalon wrote:
| We're bad at so very many things while thinking we're the best
| at everything.
| anonymou2 wrote:
| don't worry, pretty soon you're gonna be great...
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Climate change enters the chat...
| adrianN wrote:
| Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings
| (other than war, which to my knowledge never was insurable)
| in most areas of the world.
| agsnu wrote:
| A significant portion of human structures are located close
| to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of
| economic development for a few hundred years) and are
| exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in
| valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to
| far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff
| (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather
| systems; see eg massive floods in Europe in the past few
| years).
| adrianN wrote:
| Compared to the other challenges climate change poses
| those are fairly simple engineering problems. The
| Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country
| below sea level.
| graemep wrote:
| and sea level rises are slow enough that countries with
| more high ground than The Netherlands can just not
| rebuild/maintain old houses in vulnerable positions and
| build higher (often just a bit further in) instead.
|
| Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities)
| and have steep rises anyway.
|
| There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| A few critical ingredients being: no denialism about
| their vulnerability, strong social and economic
| commitment to reducing vulnerability, lack of reflexively
| blaming floods on illegal immigrants or trans people
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Also they don't blame the climate or weather on democrats
| there.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I forgot that one! The Dems controlling the weather. Big
| one!
| jyounker wrote:
| The Netherlands has been planning for the impacts of sea-
| level rise for decades now. At least twenty years ago the
| government broached the idea (with TV commercials) that
| they were going to have to abandon some are areas to the
| sea.
| avianlyric wrote:
| You're ignoring things like the geological conditions in
| the Netherlands, they have very peaty soil which is
| fairly impermeable to water. Which makes the task of keep
| the sea back pretty easy, you just build a big wall.
|
| But if you look in places like Florida, the ground
| conditions there are substantially more porous. If you
| try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it'll
| just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have
| to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of
| impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from
| flooding due to sea level rise. Something that's
| unbelievably cost prohibitive to do.
|
| The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their
| ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the
| country using technology available in the 1740s. If the
| ground conditions weren't basically perfect for this kind
| of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn't exist
| as it does today.
|
| You're using an example that exists purely as a result of
| survivorship bias, as an argument that it's practical to
| apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes
| anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your
| example only exists because a unique set of geologic
| conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far
| from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places
| we humans would like to protect.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Karst Topography enters the room....
| CalRobert wrote:
| Seems like having the ocean at your door would be bad for
| the structure? Or burning down in a hot dry period...
| adrianN wrote:
| Why would a city like London or Paris burn down in a hot
| dry period?
| snacksmcgee wrote:
| You're refuting a lot of established facts about the
| risks of climate change, in a way that seems indicative
| of a certain ideology. Can you explain more what your
| position is?
| adrianN wrote:
| My position is that climate change is an existential
| threat to civilization, but buildings are not at a risk
| that would make them uninsurable. We build cities both in
| very wet and very hot and dry climates without much
| trouble. Those are engineering problems we can solve
| without much trouble.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| But with lots more money, which is what insurance deals
| with
|
| Of course they're insurable _at some premium._ The
| question is whether there is any premium someone is
| willing to pay that can also cover the risk.
| notabee wrote:
| It's also a social coordination problem. For example a
| neighborhood where _all_ the homes have to be fire
| resistant is going to fare a lot better, and probably be
| cheaper for the individual home owners to build and
| insure, than the one fire-resistant home in a
| neighborhood of tinder boxes. I don 't think the
| prognosis is good for the U.S. in that regard. We have
| very little social cohesion and a lot of parties
| interested in making the situation worse for their own
| benefit.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| 1666 has entered the chat.
| mr_toad wrote:
| London is at much more risk of flooding. Parts of London
| were built on wetlands not much above sea level, and
| there's a big river running right through the middle.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I don't know about that. The Iberian peninsula is not
| historically at much risk for natural disasters, and we now
| suffer alternating forest fires and floods pretty much
| every year...
| lores wrote:
| I remember forest fires yearly in northern Spain in the
| 80s. Are they more violent now?
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Climate change deals frequency, rather than novelty. Oh
| and as crypto bros like to say: we're early.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Mostly they seem to have planted a lot more Eucalyptus,
| which makes the fires worse. The severe floods on the
| other hand seem to be catching everyone by surprise.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Except for Fire?
| helboi4 wrote:
| You literally pulled this take out of your ass. Water and
| fire can shockingly ruin buildings.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to
| buildings
|
| Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting
| worse.
|
| More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing
| buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in
| California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a
| political solution is forest management. Lack of water can
| be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem
| rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from
| solar panels because they reduce water loss from
| evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies.
|
| It is expensive, but that's another problem.
| notabee wrote:
| That's not really true. The introduction of so much extra
| energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather
| extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as
| historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern
| changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely
| change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that
| have little history of tornados will start having them, or
| places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly
| experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite
| scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment
| with no control group and predictions will only become more
| difficult the harder we push the system into a new state.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Pole drift.
| defrost wrote:
| Magnetic, rotational, geodetic .. ?
|
| What are you trying to say?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Can there even be geodetic drift of the poles? I sort of
| assumed that our lat/lon system is based on the poles
| being fixed points as a matter of definition.
| defrost wrote:
| Each ellipsoid is rigidly defined ( _well, some historic
| ones are sloppy), so WGS84 won 't drift .. (that's a bold
| statement, is it true down to the micron and if so what
| are the _absolute* datums to reference against?).
|
| That said, there are literally hundreds of _historic_ pre
| WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat
| different "survey map pole".
|
| Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function
| of datums.
|
| The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the
| infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment ..
| which pole and what does that have to do with climate
| change? etc.
| avianlyric wrote:
| We still use many of those old ellipsis and datum's
| today. When you're doing human things, like surveying
| land, and defining property boundaries. It's nice to work
| with a coordinate system which remains fixed relative to
| the area you're surveying, and doesn't drift due to
| annoying things like tectonic movement, or your entire
| country slowly tipping into the ocean.
| sampo wrote:
| > What are you trying to say?
|
| Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_sh
| ift_hypothe...
| soco wrote:
| Does it really matter if my house burns because of pole
| drift or because of climate change? I don't like it burning
| either way. So if there is something I can do against my
| house burning, (and I know there are things I can do
| against that) I will definitely try that. And I believe we
| agree that we could do things, right?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Still waiting for the water to flood New York...
| fragmede wrote:
| Hurricane Ida in 2019 brought torrential rains which
| flooded the city, especially the subway.
| jyounker wrote:
| That happened six years ago:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/severe-rainfall-hits-new-
| yor...
| Macha wrote:
| And last year:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxqswOkZMSI
| randerson wrote:
| Hurricane Sandy flooded big parts of lower Manhattan and
| Brooklyn. I have friends who couldn't go back to their
| apartments or offices for months afterwards.
| topspin wrote:
| How did climate change cause vast neighborhoods of single-
| family wooden mcmansions to be constructed with ~3 meters of
| separation?
| HacklesRaised wrote:
| To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is
| prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building
| materials.
|
| Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is
| a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should
| be left to nature.
|
| What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the
| summer? $400?
|
| Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't
| think that's the case.
|
| New Orleans is a future Atlantis.
|
| San Francisco is a city built by Monty Python. Don't build it
| there it'll fall down, but I built it anyway, and it fell down,
| so I built it again...
| simianparrot wrote:
| > To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that
| is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building
| materials.
|
| Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this.
|
| > Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't
| think that's the case.
|
| Relevant:
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-
| flame...
| niemandhier wrote:
| Sure Japan did it, so did Mexico. The latter is probably
| much more important as an example for the US.
|
| https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-
| how-1985-disast...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current
| codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was
| insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the
| state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them
| all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?
| forgotmysn wrote:
| Mexico is in the middle of a crippling drought
| contravariant wrote:
| I would be interested to know how Japan combats wildfires.
| Historically at least it was quite a big problem, if I
| recall correctly.
| leguminous wrote:
| > What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the
| summer? $400?
|
| The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F
| (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a
| difference of 36.5F (20.3C).
|
| The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you
| are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F
| (20.5C).
|
| I feel like many people living in climates that don't require
| air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically
| inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating
| (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be
| significantly more efficient per degree of difference.
| Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in
| Phoenix.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| 100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps
| that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation
| between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you
| to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar
| panels right now covered with snow.)
| phaedrus441 wrote:
| This is such an interesting perspective that I've never
| thought about. Thanks!
| avianlyric wrote:
| You're ignoring one critical difference between these two
| scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities,
| produce heat as a waste product. It's much easier, and
| consumes less _additional_ energy, to heat an occupied
| space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your
| average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
|
| So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of
| energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot
| space, it's an extra 80W that needs to be removed.
|
| Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It's not
| unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just
| keep stuff powered on in standby, and that's another 100W
| of "free" heating. All of this is before we get to big
| ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.
|
| 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.
|
| All of this is ignoring the fact that it's easy to create a
| tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it's
| called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to
| create a cool individual environment around a person. So in
| cold spaces you don't have to heat everything up to same
| temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but
| when cooling a space, you have to cool everything,
| regardless of if it'll impact the comfort of the occupants.
| mbesto wrote:
| I also point out that Phoenix's "summer" last longer than
| Berlin's winter:
|
| https://weatherspark.com/y/75981/Average-Weather-in-
| Berlin-G...
|
| https://weatherspark.com/y/2460/Average-Weather-in-
| Phoenix-A...
| dsr_ wrote:
| The figure you are looking for is heating/cooling degree-
| days.
|
| For each day, use the average high and the average low.
| Subtract the desired maximum dwelling temperature from
| the average high: if the result is positive, add it to
| the cooling degree-days total. Subtract the average low
| from the from the minimum dwelling temperature: if the
| result is positive, add it to the heating degree-days
| total.
|
| Over a year, that gives you comparable figures on how
| much you will need to cool or heat the space. Many
| agencies calculate this for specific areas.
|
| Here, for example, are the current season numbers for
| Boston:
| https://www.massenergymarketers.org/resources/degree-
| days/bo...
|
| Generic regional numbers for the US:
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/units-and-
| calculators/de...
| szvsw wrote:
| A lot of what you said is intuitively/directionally
| correct, but misses a lot of important physics related to
| heat transfer in buildings and operational questions of
| space heating equipment.
|
| This is your most accurate/relevant point:
|
| > All of this is ignoring the fact that it's easy to
| create a tiny personal heated environment around an
| individual (it's called a woolly jumper).
|
| Whereas this is plainly wrong:
|
| > It's much easier, and consumes less additional energy,
| to heat an occupied space, than to cool it.
|
| And then the following is correct but the marginal
| reduction in load is minimal except in relatively crowded
| spaces (or spaces with very high equipment power
| densities):
|
| > Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W
| of heat just to stay alive.
|
| The truth is it is generally _easier_ to cool not heat
| when you take into account the necessary energy input to
| achieve the desired action on the psychrometric chart,
| assuming by "ease" you mean energy (or emissions) used,
| given that you are operating over a large volume of air -
| which does align with your point about the jumper to be
| fair!
|
| Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of
| electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces
| since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation
| (simplified ELI5). It is only spending energy to move
| heat, not make it. On the other hand, a boiler or furnace
| or resistance heat system generally uses around 1 unit of
| input energy for every 0.8-0.9 units of heating energy
| produced. Heat pumps achieve similar to coefficients of
| performance as A/Cs, because they are effectively just
| A/Cs operating in reverse.
|
| Your point about a jumper is great, but there are local
| cooling strategies as well (tho not as effective), eg
| using a fan or an adiabatic cooling device (eg a mister
| in a hot dry climate).
|
| > So cooling a living space is always more costly than
| heating a living space.
|
| Once you move to cost, it now also depends on your fuel
| prices, not just your demand and system type. For
| instance, in America, nat gas is so cheap, that even with
| its inefficiencies relative to a heat pump, if
| electricity is expensive heating might still be cheaper
| than cooling per unit of thermal demand (this is true for
| instance in MA, since electricity is often 3x the price
| of NG). On the other hand, if elec is less than 3x the
| cost of nat gas, then cooling is probably cheaper than
| heating per unit of demand, assuming you use natural gas
| for your heating system.
| nixusg wrote:
| Solar power works very well in summer and can be used for
| cooling.
| overflow897 wrote:
| "cooling a living space is always more costly than
| heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it
| definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly
| cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but
| they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets.
| Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount
| of heat.
| mcny wrote:
| > "cooling a living space is always more costly than
| heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it
| definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly
| cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but
| they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets.
| Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount
| of heat.
|
| I thought any place that is significantly cold can still
| dig underground and at some point you can get enough heat
| to run your heat pump?
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Right, but that's expensive too (initial outlay and
| maintenance) and needs to win a lot of efficiency before
| it pays off.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah, if you have a bare minimum of 30k burning a hole in
| your pocket and enough open land to drill the well with
| the correct geology, and the larger your house the
| bigger/more wells you need as you're drawing from the
| Earth's relatively constant temperature. So the only way
| to get more heat is to get more surface area for the
| coolant.
|
| Some people on reddit are reporting quotes of 125k for
| larger (>3000 sq ft) houses.
|
| As someone who lives in a 4-season environment that can
| get down into the single digits F on occasion in the
| winter (forecast to be there for a couple of days next
| week), and has an air-source heat pump, I just suck it up
| and eat the $400-$500/month heating costs for the
| auxiliary (electric resistive) heat in Dec/Jan/Feb. If
| someone gifts me a ground-sourced heat pump I'll gladly
| accept, but I've got kids to raise so setting aside money
| for one is a long way off.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Heating is more costly if you use technology created for
| cooling. When you try to cool a cold space in order to
| heat hot space, you will have a bad time. You could use
| electric heater for heating, it should have no problems
| with heating, but will use more electricity. Or you could
| use something actually cheaper, like wood or fossil
| fuels. If you use more expensive method (like
| electricity) it will be more expensive.
| pastage wrote:
| This might be true for you. I have lived with free wood
| for heating and it was more expensive for me than using a
| heat pump. What is expensive depends on a lot of factors,
| political, social, location, time and knowledge. It is
| not a clear dollar per delta T.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Chopping up a tree is kind of fun, we bill that to the
| entertainment budget instead of the heating budget. And
| it usually happens during a hotter season, so I might
| have to go inside to take a break, get a cool drink. So,
| we can bill some of the tree chopping activity to the
| cooling budget!
| megaman821 wrote:
| It is true that heat is easier to generate. Berlin is
| considered mild while Phoenix is considered very hot.
| They just happen to have the same temperature deltas. On
| the whole, the world spends many, many times more energy
| heating living spaces than cooling them. The coldest
| cities people live in just have much larger room
| temperature deltas than the hottest.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'm reading this discussion while smh. Looking at a high
| temperature of -10F on Sunday!
| icehawk wrote:
| > _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 do 0.98, the best you get with
| electric resistive heat is 1W.
|
| On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat
| outside for every 1W of energy input.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| My AC works in both directions, in winter it moves more
| cold outside than the power it consumes. Not sure what
| the factor is exactly, but I think same as for cooling.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Thermodynamics unfortunately disagree. As your
| temperature deltas get smaller efficiency goes down.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| "Thermodynamics" is singular :) As for the numbers, my
| AC's manual shows COP of 3.71 for heating and 3.13 for
| cooling.
|
| So you are spot on, in winter temperature deltas are
| larger, and efficiency goes up.
| leguminous wrote:
| Those high COPs are probably for relatively small
| temperature deltas. Heat pumps get _less_ efficient when
| the temperature deltas are larger. See page 18 of the
| manual linked below for an example. As the temperature
| gets lower, the heating COP gets lower. The same should
| be the case with cooling (higher outdoor temperatures
| lead to lower COPs), but the data is not presented in the
| same way.
|
| https://backend.daikincomfort.com/docs/default-
| source/produc...
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I see, the previous commenter stated the opposite :).
| Anyway, both numbers are > 1.
| bruckie wrote:
| You are saying that heat pumps get _less_ efficient when
| deltas are larger, and the parent post says they get
| _more_ efficient when deltas are larger. In a sense, you
| 're both correct.
|
| There are multiple relevant temperatures for a heat pump,
| and the pump is more efficient when some of those are
| higher and some lower. A heat pump has two heat
| exchangers, one on the inside of the building and one
| outside. Each of those heat exchangers has two
| temperatures: the refrigerant loop temperature at that
| point, and the ambient temperature (air for air source
| heat pumps, ground for ground source heat pumps). There's
| also a fifth relevant temperature that has indirect
| influence: the setpoint (the desired indoor ambient
| temperature).
|
| Efficiency increases when the temperature delta between
| the refrigerant and ambient temperatures is higher (both
| indoor and outdoor). But _those_ temperature deltas vary
| inversely with the delta between the indoor and outdoor
| ambient temperatures.
|
| So, in summary:
|
| - Heat pumps get less efficient when the temperature
| delta between indoor and outdoor temperature is higher.
|
| - They get more efficient when the temperature delta
| between refrigerant and ambient temperature is higher.
|
| The net effect of this is that heat pumps become less
| efficient as the temperature becomes hotter outside in
| the summer and colder outside in the winter.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Correct!
|
| You can also think about it as far as actually moving
| heat. Cold is the absence of heat, and so when the air is
| colder, there is less heat moved for the same effort and
| you have to work harder -- less efficiently -- for the
| same amount of head to get moved.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > "Thermodynamics" is singular :)
|
| > plural in form but singular or plural in construction
|
| (https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/thermodynamics)
|
| I think American and British English treat words like
| this differently.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > 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?
| icehawk wrote:
| Yes, last 10% goes up the chimney, so only 0.9W goes into
| the house.
| leguminous wrote:
| 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 pump water heater, it will actually
| _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred
| from your home to your water and mostly goes down the
| drain with it.
|
| * At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be
| wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower
| target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could
| find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in
| the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war
| with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at
| 19.4C, on average.
|
| * Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose
| Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out
| conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American
| upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be
| particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the
| hottest city in the country and its summers are some of
| the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities
| are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature
| than the coldest are.
|
| [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/80-percent-
| german-house... (original report is on German)
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| As someone acclimated to warmer weather, I disagree.
| People work outside in 85, 90, 95deg weather without
| health problems all the time. Hydrate and your body will
| acclimate.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Depends on the humidity. Sweating is more efficient in
| less humid climates IIRC.
| triceratops wrote:
| > So cooling a living space is always more costly than
| heating a living space
|
| Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses
| less efficient technology than cooling and has to work
| across a higher temperature difference.
|
| In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter
| can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20
| inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the
| summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more
| costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances.
| Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air
| conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a
| furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling
| methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in
| the developing world and continental Europe.
|
| On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot
| summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is
| more expensive because heating is unnecessary.
|
| The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60
| degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human
| body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees
| _below_ body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is
| way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And
| cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient
| than the technologies used most commonly for heating
| (resistive or combustion).
|
| > when cooling a space, you have to cool everything,
| regardless of if it'll impact the comfort of the
| occupants.
|
| Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling
| fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more
| comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the
| outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-
| arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the
| summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice
| water).
| loandbehold wrote:
| Cooling takes less energy per BTU moved vs heating. In
| AC/heat pumps that's represented by SEER rating for
| cooling and HSPF rating for heating (heat pumps). Modern
| ACs have SEER ratings for 20+ and HSPF ratings for 8+.
| What it means is that on average, spending 1 BTU
| equivalent of electrical energy cools down the house by
| 20 BTU. Similarly for heat pump it means spending 1 BTU
| of electricity heats up the house by 8 BTU. Electric
| resistive heating is equivalent of HSPF 1.
|
| Also in sunny climates it's easy to use solar energy for
| cooling making it carbon net-zero. Cold places typically
| burn natural gas for heating, it's much harder to make
| heating carbon net-zero.
| hhjinks wrote:
| Recently it was -7C where I lived. Even without heating, my
| indoor temp didn't go below 15C. In regions where cold
| temperatures are common, isolation and heat retaining
| materials are very common. Is preventing heat gain as
| simple as preventing heat loss?
| flerchin wrote:
| Yes
| twothamendment wrote:
| Yes, insulation works both ways. My garage is unheated
| and insulated. If I go out there to work on something in
| the winter I always compare the temperature outside. On a
| sunny day it might be pleasant outside and freezing in my
| garage - so I'll open the door and let it warm up.
|
| Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature
| change (relative to the inside and outside).
|
| One thing people forget is the delta is very different in
| the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70
| year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to
| cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of
| 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more
| energy in the winter.
| currymj wrote:
| you cannot win this argument with the average person who
| lives in a chilly European country. it just does not
| compute.
|
| there are whole important cultural lifeways related to
| opening and closing windows at proper times for efficient
| cooling and ventilation. these work really well -- in
| Europe -- and are treasured traditions.
|
| getting people to accept AC is sort of like trying to
| convince the average American to go grocery shopping on a
| bicycle. some may accept the idea but only the most
| European influenced already.
| noqc wrote:
| a greenhouse can heat a space by enough to be comfortable
| for free, but not cool it. Windows and sunlight matter.
| diogocp wrote:
| > To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that
| is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building
| materials.
|
| Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo
| in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.
|
| When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of
| using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and
| masonry walls for fire resistance.
|
| Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.
|
| I wonder if American children are taught the story of the
| three little pigs.
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn
| that wood is the only appropriate building material and the
| Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest
| of trees to construct.
|
| The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of
| course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures
| from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology
| was created in California. It's either naive or willfully
| ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.
|
| The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out,
| suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame
| construction is a great way to affordably build housing.
| Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's
| how we design our cities that's the problem.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country.
|
| We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete
| structure, because it's cheap.
|
| You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly
| expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to
| cut forests down to get it.
| erikerikson wrote:
| This was surprising because here in the US, concrete is
| expensive to build with. I'm considering a build and by
| far log homes seem my cheapest option.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, people from the US always say concrete is expensive
| and wood is cheap. And unless you are designing a tent
| (by the way, zinc is way cheaper than wood for a tent),
| only people from the US say that.
|
| There's something distorting your economy. Concrete is
| incredibly cheap as a material, extremely prone to use in
| a large supply chain, and requires way less labor than
| wood.
|
| You make houses siting over finely built wood lattices...
| how much do you pay to the people building those? Because
| I can't imagine it being justifiable with Brazilian
| salaries.
| nradov wrote:
| Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not
| cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood
| used for residential construction is milled from trees
| grown specifically for that purpose.
| wrfrmers wrote:
| Lumber is quite a bit lower quality than it used to be,
| because we're no longer using old-growth timber. Less
| dense wood burns faster, as does the laminated strand
| board that long ago replaced plywood (unless you're
| really fancy) (and toxic fire retardant treatments be
| damned).
|
| The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America
| that don't make sense economically, but that persist
| because of momentum, with each generation receiving an
| inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See
| also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas
| prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to
| nothing).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > We're not cutting down forests for it, either.
|
| The largest share of the illegal wood extracted from
| Brazil goes to the US.
| nradov wrote:
| The illegal hardwood is not used for residential framing
| or sheathing. It has nothing to do with fire resistance
| or insurance.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Most illegal wood is not hardwood.
|
| What is not to say that most of the wood in the US is
| illegal. It's probably a small share. But some of your
| houses do pretty much chop forests down. (And your
| government does help fight that, but it's hard to
| completely stop it.)
| njovin wrote:
| There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The
| Colorado River.
|
| The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years
| ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to
| it so that they can grow _feed_ for farm animals to sell
| _overseas_ , largely to places like UAE that have
| sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it
| impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of
| droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these
| corporations.
|
| Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our
| natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of
| the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever
| corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change.
|
| When European descendants started colonizing that part of
| the world they treated all the resources as free for the
| taking. You went into nature, developed some land for
| agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with
| the water. It was essentially homesteading.
|
| So water was treated as property the same way the land was.
| Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives
| because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.
|
| How we fix it now within that legal framework is the
| question.
| talldrinkofwhat wrote:
| Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical
| standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no
| cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of
| legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.
| harimau777 wrote:
| What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just
| relocate an entire city.
|
| Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between
| wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most
| of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its
| identity to a significant degree as being opposed to
| cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to
| move to even if we could just move the cities.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides
| and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see
| homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-
| lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas
| should be treated similarly.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| I would assume that earthquake insurance in japan is a
| reasonable model for "world insurance".
|
| It looks like it's a reinsurance program:
|
| https://www.mof.go.jp/english/policy/financial_system/earthq...
|
| So, I think the answer is "no".
| tzs wrote:
| Japan is probably not a good comparison for home insurance
| because houses in Japan typically only have a 20 to 30 year
| lifespan. After that they are usually torn down and a new
| house is built.
| Over2Chars wrote:
| Its a country built on seismically active volcanoes.
|
| If there's earthquake insurance in japan, it should be do-
| able.
|
| "In and around Japan, one-tenth of earthquakes in the world
| occur. " https://geoscienceletters.springeropen.com/article
| s/10.1186/...
| klodolph wrote:
| Home values in Japan are somewhat anomalous. There are
| some good policies that contribute to this, but also
| other factors that make me reluctant to generalize from
| Japan. It's a country with declining natural population,
| where houses are assets that rapidly decline in value to
| the point where they're nearly worthless not that long
| after you buy them.
|
| Average home age in Japan is 30 years. I think, maybe
| once or twice, I've lived in a building less than 30
| years old in the US. I've spent most of my life in
| buildings built pre-war. There aren't so many pre-war
| buildings in Japan, but the US takes the blame for that
| one :-(
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| 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.
| skywhopper wrote:
| You could Google it and find out.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I could but I won't... do you think I asked that question
| because I urgently need accurate data on Japanese
| housing? Why does anyone join forums, or discuss things
| with friends in real life when they could just Google
| things?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Retire this meme. Google sucks now.
| Macha wrote:
| The traditional materials used in Japanese construction
| of everyday homes aren't really in the "built to last"
| category: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1DP5xpM3Y8 .
| In some cases, trying to make a house that was resistant
| to floods, fires and earthquakes at the same time would
| have been prohibitively expensive. I'm sure that led to
| forming habits that have continued into more modern eras
| of building styles where it's less required.
|
| They're also smaller, which makes construction costs
| cheaper which means people are more likely to make
| dramatic changes when fashion changes. And then there's
| more of a culture of prefab house building rather than
| extensions etc. Planning is also a lot more liberal which
| allows the rebuilt house to be more different and also
| reduces the cost of the process.
|
| I think even in Europe some of the older houses are
| houses of theseus though. The exterior shell is the same,
| but there's plenty of buildings in the local city centre
| that were tenements, then small business offices, then
| apartments, with significant remodeling that occurred. Or
| the house I used to live in was built in the 1880s,
| extended in the 1950s and significantly modernised in the
| 2000s. Each time there would have involved largely
| gutting the interior and rebuilding.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Interesting, thanks! The regulatory explanation makes a
| lot of sense- I once tried to pull a permit to install a
| ceiling fan in a small USA town, and it was a nightmare.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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/
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| That is a fascinating cultural perspective and explains a
| lot of things to me:
|
| I've always treated cars like houses are in the USA- I
| buy an older higher end car like a Porsche, keep it in
| perfect shape, and expect it to appreciate- and it does.
| Most cars I've owned I ultimately sold for much more than
| I paid. I've never understood why anyone would waste
| money on a depreciating car, especially when a fully
| depreciated high end car is so much nicer and cheaper
| than a low end new one. Airplanes are not mechanically
| that different than a car, yet generally last and hold
| value if maintained.
|
| I've also never understood why people in the USA assume
| houses will always appreciate, as if it is a law of
| nature or something- when at its core houses can't
| appreciate forever relative to inflation, because there
| is a hard cap somewhere below people paying 100% of
| income for housing. This basically proves it is just a
| combination of a culture that values older housing in the
| USA and regulatory capture preventing new construction.
| New houses are often seen as "cold," "sterile," or
| "lacking character" in the USA- and the stereotype of a
| successful wealthy person is in a giant old mansion.
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm always baffled at the fact that Americans don't build
| houses out of bricks.
|
| I read those arguments of the advantages this method has,
| especially financial ones, but to me it's nonsense considering
| that it would prevent an endless number of problems that cause
| the total loss.
|
| I still remember when New Orleans was hit with by Katrina,
| large parts of the suburbs where houses where made by wood and
| plastic where destroyed, yet downtown where buildings where
| made of bricks required maintenance, sometimes little of it,
| but none faced a total loss.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The entire west coast sits on top of a fault line. That's why
| people don't build with brick here. There's plenty of brick
| buildings on the east coast (and on the west coast like in
| Oregon, but they have to be seismically retrofitted which is
| expensive).
| j16sdiz wrote:
| It works for Taiwan and Japan
| bane wrote:
| Japanese houses aren't built with brick.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Is that brick or is it reinforced masonry?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Both. Older single story tends to be brick.
|
| Newer multistory is typically cast in place with rebar
| reinforcement from what I can tell.
|
| In the countryside, you might find more masonry block
| construction, but not in dense urban areas like Taipei
| and Taichung where the norm is to build up. Most "single
| family homes" are what we would consider very large
| condos in the US.
| yulaow wrote:
| I never understood this. We build in Europe, over
| earthquake-risk zones, with bricks and steel and we follow
| rules to make them earthquake resistant. It is not a
| problem anymore since like the 1980. We now have also
| methods to make old and very old brick buildings earthquake
| resistant without demolishing them
| throwup238 wrote:
| It works fine for commercial buildings and multi-family
| structures here too , there's even a ton of brick
| buildings in Oregon (which are currently being
| retrofitted), but not as well for single family homes
| because of the cost.
|
| There's a lot of historical context to understand here.
| The neighborhood that just burned down in the Eaton fire
| (Altadena), was built up by African Americans and Latinos
| who were redlined out of Pasadena even after
| desegregation. Some of them built their houses on land
| that they bought for under $100 in the 1950s and 60s.
| They wouldn't have been able to afford the kind of
| construction they'd need to be both earthquake and fire
| resistant. Their choice was between owning an old
| tinderbox or renting from slumlords.
| kranke155 wrote:
| What? What earthquake zone in Europe is similar to the
| fault lines in California? We are talking about entire
| cities wiped out by earthquakes just 120 years ago.
| anthomtb wrote:
| Southern Italy. I believe the rest of Europe is quite
| seismically stable.
| anthomtb wrote:
| 5 hours of thought later, I am recalling that Greece is
| also seismically active.
| mr_toad wrote:
| There's a plate boundary running under Morocco and across
| the Mediterranean, but it's not nearly as active as the
| Pacific Rim, and it's quite a long way from Northern
| Europe.
| nujabe wrote:
| It's not just the West coast, brick buildings are simply
| not common all throughout the US, in places fault lines
| don't exist.
| klodolph wrote:
| Bricks have to be manufactured and transported. In denser
| countries, the transportation cost is lower and there is
| a factory near you. In the US, you're damn well sure you
| can find timber, the US is loaded with timber.
|
| Brick also isn't some magical building material that
| solves all your problems without drawbacks. Wood isn't
| some evil building material that creates a bunch of
| problems without benefits.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Building out of wood is cheap and perfectly strong for most
| areas.
|
| Engineering is always a set of trade-offs.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't get how can one put his own future in a cheaply
| built building you're one fire or thougher-than-usual
| natural event away from losing.
|
| It's normal nobody wants to insure such risky assets,
| especially as nominal value of this wooden crap is stellar
| due to the skewed demand/offer ratio plaguing good parts of
| US.
|
| In my life I've seen my and my family's real estate being
| hit by a tree, fire, floodings and I've never had to face
| anything close to a total loss.
|
| Huge expenses? Sure. But never anything close to a loss.
|
| The only thing that could put my real estate on a serious
| risk are earthquakes, I guess that's a scenario where
| lighter built houses would have instead an advantage.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Define "cheaply built". These houses are already hugely
| expensive, to the point that we cant even afford to build
| more.
| petsfed wrote:
| This is less like "well, I could get the $10 pants and
| have to replace them in a few months, or the $70 pants
| and have them last a decade" sort of cheap, and more the
| "well, I've been saving a mortgage down-payment for 15
| years in the top 30% of individual wage earners, and this
| is the best built house I can afford" kind.
|
| The options are either pay more for this one thing than
| literally any other possession you or anyone you know
| will ever own, or live in a tent or worse.
|
| I feel like criticizing people for pragmatism in the face
| of (literally) existential threats is some kind of next-
| level privilege.
| dnh44 wrote:
| Given the choice between earthquake-proof and fire-proof
| I'd go with earthquake-proof every single time since you
| can't run from an earthquake.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It's mostly that there is virtually no one in America who
| knows how to build with concrete/bricks.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Unreinforced masonry is illegal in most of California and
| extremely dangerous- every brick becomes a projectile in an
| earthquake.
|
| Despite the news coverage, fires are extremely rare but
| nearly every home in these areas is guaranteed to face
| multiple massive earthquakes that would bring down a brick
| building.
| prmoustache wrote:
| In cusco basin in Peru spanish colons realized their brick
| made building were falling down at every earthquake. They
| also realized incas building made of thin walls built on
| top of large stones that can move relative to each others
| during an earthquake were resisting much better. They then
| decided to reuse the foundations of incas buildings and put
| their brick build constructions on top of it to have
| earthquake resistant building.
|
| Earthquake resistant constructions made of stones have been
| known for centuries by the incas and probably other
| civilizations without having building entirely made of
| wood, why can't californians?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I don't know but do they have ~7.9 earthquakes like
| California? I'll bet they were not multi story homes with
| vaulted ceilings, giant glass windows with tons of
| natural light, and efficient insulation?
|
| Wood is extremely cheap, and extremely earthquake
| resistant... it is an appropriate material for the area
| despite a slightly higher fire risk.
| prmoustache wrote:
| They have had up to ~9.0Mw earthquakes in their history.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Peru
|
| You can also look at some states like Chiapas in Mexico.
| There are daily earthquakes in Tuxla. Last 8.2 was in
| 2017 in Tapachula. They typically live in small building
| made of mud bricks and stones.
| https://earthquakelist.org/mexico/chiapas/#all-latest-
| earthq...
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| In practice, it is probably impossible to innovate on
| housing materials in California- I doubt you could get a
| permit or insurance, which is a shame.
|
| Plus, I and most people wouldn't personally want to buy a
| any type of stone or brick house- it would take a lot of
| evidence to convince me it was earthquake safe, and I'm
| not sure how one could produce such evidence. Resale
| value and demand would be very low for something unusual.
|
| Wood houses in practice aren't a big problem. There is
| something like a 3% chance per century of a wood house
| burning down in California, and almost all of those are
| centered on specific locations that are known to be very
| high risk and can be avoided if desired.
|
| In most cases you would escape safely and be covered by
| insurance (neither of which would be the case with a
| stone house in an earthquake). In California almost
| everyone has fire insurance, almost nobody can get
| earthquake insurance. Probably if a stone house was in a
| large fire, it would still be burned to bare walls and
| still be as unlivable and expensive to rebuild.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Wood is way cheaper and more available at large scale here
| than in Europe.
| riskable wrote:
| If you built a home out of bricks in New Orleans it will
| sink. Same (and even worse) for Florida. You _can_ mitigate
| that somewhat but it 's extremely expensive and bad for the
| environment/water table/aquifer.
|
| For reference, to make a non-sinking, heavy building in
| Florida you have to drill down into the limestone layer which
| is usually 100+ feet below the surface. Then you have to
| create very strong concrete caissons to hold the building up,
| standing on that limestone layer. It's very similar to if you
| were to build a structure out into the ocean (LOL).
| Modified3019 wrote:
| If I'm choosing building materials to try and resist
| disaster, I'd just go straight to making a monolithic dome.
| infecto wrote:
| Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do
| they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood",
| "sticks", "twigs" etc? It at least for me always detracts from
| the argument at hand. You could just as easily build a wood
| framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using
| modern materials or brick.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Some of us live in reinforced concrete socialist-built
| apartment buildings, and our homes don't burn like american
| houses do. Same for single family houses made from brics and
| cement (most houses here)
|
| Same for eg. gas explosions, this is one one looks like in
| us:
|
| https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/23081219122.
| ..
|
| And this is one over here:
|
| https://www.prlekija-on.net/uploaded/2018_11/eksplozija-
| plin...
|
| Same for eg floods, pump the basements and ground levels,
| repaint, move stuff back in. Someone from US I work with on a
| project had a pipe burst while on vacation, and insurance
| wrote off their whole house, because of a few days of water.
|
| I mean, sure, you could that, but looking at the photos from
| fire-affected areas, nobody did that, it's all burnt to the
| ground.
| infecto wrote:
| I think you missed the point. Its the same as me asking
| about the drab prisons you live in. Not to mention your
| cherry picked examples don't really hold up. A 2500sqft
| home filled with natural gas has a different explosive
| potential than a small apartment. I am also not sure it
| makes sense to build homes expecting for a natural gas
| explosion, not even a measurable risk. You can absolutely
| build a home that is fire resistant which most modern homes
| in fire risk areas are.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| A lot of people do, in fact, talk like that about eastern
| european homes (them selves included).
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Even single family homes are built from bricks and
| cement. Even large ones.
|
| It's not just gas explosion, it's 'everything', fire,
| structural rigidity (only ground floor houses are rare,
| almost non existant here), and well.. they're built to
| last.
|
| https://www.metropolitan.si/kronika/tovornjak-trcil-v-
| hiso-s... <- a truck hit a building, and old one, and you
| can see the damage... one wall. The girl in the room
| survived.
|
| I mean... again.. you could build a home that is "fire
| resistant", and we do, but most americans don't, as we
| see in LA.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an
| exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials
| or brick.
|
| That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are
| constructed. They are pre-fabbed timber frames with a brick
| facade. It's quite common for British people to be snobby
| about building materials. I wonder how many don't realise
| their house is timber framed.
| afactcheck wrote:
| > That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK
| are constructed
|
| This claim struck me as unlikely, so I did a quick fact
| check.
|
| Accroding to the most recent report I could find[1]:
| "Figures from the National House Building (NHBC) suggest
| that timber frame market share has developed from 19% in
| 2015 to 22% in 2021 and that market conditions, as
| described above, present the opportunity for this to
| develop to circa 27% by the end of the forecast period
| (2025)"
|
| This appears to be driven by Scotland where 92% of new
| builds were timber framed in 2019, while in England (where
| the majority of new houses are built) it was just 9%.
|
| [1] https://members.structuraltimber.co.uk/assets/library/s
| tamar...
| michaelt wrote:
| 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 olds, and
| they don't tend to go into other countries' construction
| traditions, or reasons _not_ to use bricks.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London
| infecto wrote:
| 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?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It draws a compelling portrait in people's minds.
| Everybody knows how easily sticks burn.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| are there people besides the posters that find this kind
| of hyperbole compelling?
| klodolph wrote:
| "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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I'm not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built
| construction took over the country because of
| advancements in fasteners.
|
| The availability of engineered wood products like plywood
| is a big part of it too. Being able to attach what's
| effectively a solid sheet of wood to a wall adds a ton of
| shearing strength, for example. (And that's without
| getting into fancy modern engineered wood products like
| parallel-strand lumber or glulam, which give you
| something even better than raw wood.)
| vollbrecht wrote:
| One huge problem with respect to fire resistance, in American
| home's, are the use of truss connector plates. While they
| have many advantages in cost and allow impressive cheap big
| houses, they fundamentally weaken the wood when it burns.
| Often houses just collapse on that joints, not because the
| overall beam failed, but this interface. In the end the use
| of "wood" is blamed, but that failed to address the
| rootcause.
| Spivak wrote:
| Especially when even in wood framed houses your walls are
| still stone specifically for the fire resistant properties.
|
| If you wanted to make fun of building practices it would
| probably be the trend of plastic siding.
| amluto wrote:
| It's not just the exterior material. You also need to screen
| or eliminate openings that embers can penetrate.
| acuozzo wrote:
| For me it's the result of pent-up anger from the popularity
| of drywall and particle board here in the US.
|
| It's not a big leap to go from complaining about the
| furniture and the walls being made from what seems like
| highly compressed dust to also complaining that underneath it
| all is a bunch of sticks.
|
| It so often _feels_ like a house of cards.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes
| do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood",
| "sticks", "twigs" etc?
|
| Europeans are jealous that they clearcut all their forests
| 1000 years ago and want to brag up their cinderblock homes
| that no one can actually afford to buy anymore. 40% down on
| their 50 year mortgages yadda yadda.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Look at houses in California. Most have fire resistant stucco
| exteriors. It's the style out here.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Brick, stucco, concrete siding are all fire resistant and
| commonly used in construction in the last 25 years.
|
| Insulation plays into combustability as well, where mineral /
| rock wool has thermal mass, does not ignite, but us
| construction has recently favored fiberglass and cellulose
| for the the costs.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| A 2x4 is just a big stick. It's smaller in shape than some
| logs you throw on the fire, and it's nice and dry.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I don't understand the sense of entitlement towards every
| nuclear family owning a building constructed with stone,
| steel, and concrete. None of these things are available in a
| level of abundance to grant them to every person alive. While
| concrete only construction is more common in developing
| countries I certainly question the quality. I lived in an
| apartment like this in South Asia and it had no weather
| insulating ability whatsoever, the plaster was constantly
| crumbling, and the doors would jam up. Not to mention the
| recurring nearby stories of an apartments roof collapsing on
| its occupant.
|
| I am thankful to live in a county where land and building
| ownership are more available to the common man than most and
| many people can escape being perpetual renters. Wood
| construction enables that. Plus North Americans love to
| adjust and remodel their homes and have unique shapes with
| high ceilings etc etc etc which is really helped with our
| construction techniques. The only thing I hate is termite
| risk and that could probably be resolved by allowing framing
| with pressure treated wood
| bialpio wrote:
| It helps with availability of materials if people don't
| expect to have like 500sqft per person. But that's not how
| modern houses are built in US, at least not in my neck of
| the woods (Seattle suburbs). As for the quality of housing,
| I'm from ex-Soviet satellite state and lived in a prefab
| apartment block - yeah, it was a bit dated but no major
| problems with quality that I could tell. The main nuisance
| was lack of acoustic insulation.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Dimensional lumber is often called sticks, in the building
| industry, probably because it's quicker. For example, if a
| roof is built from individual pieces of dimensional lumber,
| instead of pre-built trusses, the building method isn't
| called dimensional-lumber-built but stick-built.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| I hope you don't get downvoted for stating the obvious. This
| tendency of equating the US to the world happens so frequently
| and it is 99% a non-US person pointing it out.
| api wrote:
| There were houses that survived recent wildfires because they
| were built to be in a fire zone and survive fires. I'm sure
| there was damage but nowhere near total loss.
|
| I'm sure when homes are rebuilt the majority will not be fire
| resistant.
|
| It's possible to build for hurricanes and floods too but few do
| it. They build houses that get blown away and then tap
| insurance.
|
| Insurance rates for properties not built to withstand the
| stresses of their environment will go up.
| briffle wrote:
| we had a huge wildfire in my area in 2021 that burned through
| a few small towns. In one town, the only houses that survived
| where the ones that followed the guides out there for
| creating defensible space. They were also newer homes, which
| is obviously easier then retro-fitting an existing home, but
| the town got rebuilt essentially the same as it was, which is
| kind of sad to see.
|
| https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_mars.
| ..
| api wrote:
| We don't do this in e.g. aviation, where after every crash
| we study it and make changes if possible. Not sure why we
| don't seem to care in housing.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > I'm sure when homes are rebuilt the majority will not be
| fire resistant
|
| They are required to be:
| https://heatmap.news/climate/california-wildfire-building-
| co...
|
| The problem is that in many desirable places to live in
| California, many houses are very old and are not compliant
| with the latest building codes.
| chillfox wrote:
| It's possible that solve the hurricane problems with proper
| building regulations and lower the risk of huge wildfires with
| controlled burning. But the US as always prefers to pretend
| that there's nothing to be done when other parts of the world
| has figured it out.
|
| We have cyclones here similar to the hurricanes in the US and
| usually it just blows over some trees maybe causes a power
| outage. The absolute worst I have experienced was 3 days
| without power. I have never seen a house destroyed by a cyclone
| here.
|
| As for wildfires, they do unfortunately claim a few houses most
| years.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Where is "here"? Are you sure you aren't confusing hurricanes
| and tornados? Hurricanes rarely destroy houses in the US,
| either.
| chillfox wrote:
| Good to know. The news always seems to find footage of
| destroyed suburbs whenever the US is hit by a big one.
| alistairSH wrote:
| How are you making this claim? Every time a hurricane hits
| Florida, there are photos of entire neighborhoods
| devastated by wind and storm surge. How many people were
| permanently displaced by Katrine? Etc. Maybe many of the
| homes weren't technically "destroyed", but each storm
| brings millions or billions in damage.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| Hurricanes usually don't affect the structure of a house.
| They might damage the roof, parts of exterior cladding,
| perhaps windows, and the flooding which accompanies
| hurricanes destroys personal possessions, interior
| furnishing, electrical wiring, and appliances.
|
| In the US, manual labor is very expensive, home
| construction or repair is highly regulated and requires
| permits and multiple inspections from the local
| government, and the amount of flood-destroyable stuff -
| material possessions, furnishings, appliances - in a
| typical home is massive. As a result, a cyclone which a
| poorer country would survive with a shrug in the US
| becomes an extremely expensive disaster.
| alistairSH wrote:
| It sounds like we're quibbling over the definition of
| "destroyed"... if a home is rendered uninhabitable for
| days/weeks/months, I'd consider that "destroyed" even if
| the framing is in fact salvageable.
|
| And certainly as it relates to insurance, the trend sure
| seems to be well on it's way towards "coastal Florida is
| insurable" (either the price goes up beyond the means of
| the residents, or the insurers leave the market).
| Something like 5% of the state is covered by Citizen's
| Property (the government insurer of last-resort). Some
| coastal areas are ~10%. I have to imagine it won't be
| long before it's cheaper to pay people to move elsewhere
| than rebuild where they are.
| currymj wrote:
| adaptation to hurricane winds has largely been done in
| many parts of Florida; adaptation to storm surge is
| possible and some cities are beginning to.
|
| the issue for Florida is that the state is made of
| permeable limestone, so it's not possible to engineer
| around sea level rise. not so much an insurance issue
| exactly though, because it's not a one-off disaster.
| Retric wrote:
| Hurricanes are common. The general case is they hit
| hundreds or thousands of square miles and destroy none or
| at worst a tiny fraction of the homes they hit.
|
| Take Katrina from my friends and family living in New
| Orleans, you'll find city streets where none of the
| houses go significantly damaged. They lost power long
| enough you don't want to open the fridge, but most of the
| city was fine in the hardest hit city from one of the
| most expensive storms on record.
| jamroom wrote:
| Over 200,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in Katrina:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_of_New_Orlea
| ns
|
| Not sure how that is a "tiny fraction" of homes. $125
| billion in damage (2005).
| Retric wrote:
| Moving the goalposts from destroyed to damaged gives
| different results.
|
| The issue is most to the city only sustained water
| damage, a solid chunk of the city is above the water
| level and was absolutely fine. Moving outside the city
| most homes in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama etc don't need to
| worry about flooding.
| currymj wrote:
| A lot has to do with infrastructure.
|
| In most of South Florida basically anything left standing
| is pretty well built to withstand hurricanes.
|
| A category 1 storm hitting NYC or North Carolina is an
| unbelievable disaster. A category 1 storm hitting Broward
| County is usually disruptive to everyday life but that's
| it.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 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
| building regulations. If you're interested, go look at the
| recaps of tornado damage where they hit Europe here: https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and...
|
| Note the number of homes destroyed and people killed - plenty
| of both, even in those countries that prefer brick/concrete
| homes.
|
| Hurricanes throw branches. Tornados throw cars.
| blharr wrote:
| Tornados might be more intense but only for a short period
| of time and in a small area. I don't see any of those where
| the tornado is lasting days, causing sustained damage.
| There are some where there are multiple tornadoes in a
| span, but each individual tornado is itself quick and
| violent but localized within a mile or so at most.
|
| Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example,
| where it traveled across the span of a thousand miles and
| lasted a week of damages.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is
| actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it
| is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by
| a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an
| unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the
| level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The
| expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we
| just need to deal with the individual catastrophes that
| occur.
|
| Hurricanes... I mean, there are different sized
| hurricanes in different areas. For the ones that hit
| Florida, part of the solution is probably legitimately
| that we should have fewer people living there, because
| there's going to be a widespread devastation there
| occasionally. And if you live in a hurricane-prone area,
| you are going to get hit by one eventually. (So like
| what's the bet here? The insurance company knows they'll
| probably have to pay out eventually).
|
| Just to put a number to it, 2024 was apparently an
| unusually busy year for tornadoes, around $6B. That isn't
| nothing! But one single hurricane cost $7B in 2024... and
| there was a $34B one... and a $79B one... who's insuring
| the southern coast of the US? Seems rough.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| You can build houses which are much less likely to be
| seriously damaged in a hurricane. Some more ambitious
| designs are virtually hurricane proof. You never see high
| rises knocked over by a hurricane, for instance. Because
| they are (mostly) built correctly. Otherwise downtown
| areas in the entire Gulf Coast, Mid-Altantic, would
| simply not have existed for more than a few decades.
|
| The same goes for floods. Most of the problem with
| floods, is that the house frame and flooring are made of
| wood. And wood rots. If you live in a flood prone area,
| the first floor at least, should be brick or stone for
| just about everything. Yes its expensive. But so is is
| $800/month flood insurance. Or having the federal
| government bail you out and passing the cost on to the
| taxpayer
|
| But building things correctly is more expensive, and
| Americans love their cheap McMansions.
|
| Also, on an individual level there is less incentive to
| build correctly, because you will almost certainly not
| get a discount on insurance. 99% of the population is at
| the whim of either buying a used house, or whatever the
| builder's models are for new construction. Its really
| only possible if you are very wealthy and build your own
| house on your own plot.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you have to be inside one, pick a hurricane. But
| tornadoes are so much smaller. This list is like... 10-20
| per year with an average of less than 1 casualty and a
| dozen houses damaged? That's basically zero as far as
| insurance and habitability go. I found a study titled
| "Tornadoes in Europe An Underestimated Threat" and it has
| an estimate of 10-50 million euros per year in total
| damage. That's not even 1 euro per house in Europe.
| echelon wrote:
| The 2024 hurricane season damage totaled $128.072 billion.
|
| I couldn't find data for tornadoes in aggregate, only
| individual storms.
|
| > Economically, tornadoes cause about a tenth as much
| damage per year, on average, as hurricanes. Hurricanes tend
| to cause much more overall destruction than tornadoes
| because of their much larger size, longer duration and
| their greater variety of ways to damage property. The
| destructive core in hurricanes can be tens of miles across,
| last many hours and damage structures through storm surge
| and rainfall-caused flooding, as well as from wind.
| Tornadoes, in contrast, tend to be a few hundred yards in
| diameter, last for minutes and primarily cause damage from
| their extreme winds
|
| https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-
| issues/faq/how-...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The real problem is that we're politically/socially
| unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are
| responsible for creating it: Wealthy coastal landowners
| believe that the cost of home insurance should be about
| $2000/year. If their properties actually cost $200,000 per
| year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay!
| If they don't like it, they should either build something
| cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to
| somewhere with less risk.
|
| Tornados are almost the perfect example of an insurable
| hazard: Very low probability, very high damage, very widely
| distributed across the affected areas:
|
| https://mrcc.purdue.edu/gismaps/cntytorn#
|
| Click around that neat interactive map, you'll see that the
| tornado is typically a few miles long and a few hundred
| yards wide, there are a few thousand severe tornadoes
| scattered all over the Midwest and somewhat fewer on the
| east coast in the past 70 years. It's not feasible to build
| houses everywhere that will stand up to an F5 tornado
| throwing cars. But they only cause a total loss of a tiny
| fraction of all houses in the country, and there are
| relatively few choices anyone east of Texas can make that
| would meaningfully impact their risk.
|
| You could price insurance premiums at the risk of a tornado
| times the cost of the insured assets, plus a 10%
| administrative fee/profit margin, and those rates would be
| affordable. Maybe a handful of people would choose to live
| in Colorado instead of a few hundred miles east in Kansas
| because the cost of this 'tornado insurance' was higher in
| Kansas, but even in Tornado Alley it wouldn't be
| unaffordable.
|
| Conversely, if you look at the hurricane incidence and
| storm surge risk map:
|
| https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#map=4/32/-80
|
| https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8
| b...
|
| and population density along the gulf coast:
|
| https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#7/28.541/-88.011
|
| It's clear that people are choosing to build houses in the
| narrow strip of low-lying land that's right along the coast
| and vulnerable to high-probability storm surges! If
| insurance was priced at cost of assets + administration
| times risk of loss, it would be really, really expensive.
| imglorp wrote:
| > we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the
| risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
|
| This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago
| but aggressively deploying technology that worsens
| floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.
| scarby2 wrote:
| > If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to
| insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they
| don't like it, they should either build something cheaper
| (that's the other half of the product) or move to
| somewhere with less risk.
|
| Or build something adapted to the risk it faces. In my
| home town there are houses that were built on flood
| plains that have recently been flooding every 5 years or
| so. Luckily they are brick and in order to get these
| covered you now need to install flood barriers over the
| doors, and your ground floor has to be adapted to flood
| without sustaining damage (tile floors, special plaster
| etc.)
|
| Now when we have a severe flood warning people will move
| their valuables upstairs if they're house floods they
| just have to clean out the mud. There are also a couple
| new houses right next to the river that float and rise
| and fall on stilts when the banks burst.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I think most people would go for adapting their designs,
| but insurance companies would have to make that offer
| first since they ultimately decide which designs are
| insurable for which amounts.
| mempko wrote:
| The real issue is global warming causing an exponential
| rise in tail risk events. It's exponential because even a
| linear shift in temperature causes an exponential rise at
| the tails (look at how a normal distribution works).
|
| Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use
| assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies
| can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take
| the losses and then exit markets.
|
| Global warming is going to mess up insurance as we know
| it for that reason. Not sure property insurance, but all
| kinds of insurance.
| selectodude wrote:
| They exit markets due to regulations banning them from
| charging the true cost of risk. Large insurance companies
| don't just go broke. They have re-insurance that caps
| their losses. It's becoming far more difficult to get
| reinsurance and the premium caps make reinsurance
| unaffordable for the insurance company so they leave. The
| business model is managing the money - they don't much
| care about the claim losses over the long term and taking
| 1 percent of rising premiums to be a manager is a solid
| business model.
| waveBidder wrote:
| This is mostly a probability nitpick:
|
| Most disasters follow power laws and other fat tail which
| don't have the same effects in the tail as a Gaussian. If
| you shift 1/x^a by c, you "only" get a polynomial
| increase.
|
| But also, if you shift the mean of a Gaussian, the
| increase isn't exponential, it's super exponential
| (e^(x^2) to be specific).
|
| > Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use
| assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies
| can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take
| the losses and then exit markets.
|
| Sure they can, that's why they hire statisticians. They
| routinely deal with insurance of much rarer events where
| we have much worse models than climate change. They're
| just banned from charging the actual rates, because it's
| politically unacceptable.
| brightball wrote:
| I talked to somebody who owned a beach house in South
| Carolina about 5 years ago and if he wanted flood
| insurance it would cost $5,000 / month.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The real problem is that we 're politically/socially
| unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are
| responsible for creating it_
|
| A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who
| are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development
| that should never have been zoned for development in the
| first place.
| 0u89e wrote:
| Let's not be silly here. European tornadoes are not taking
| apart houses to the foundations. Ripping off roofs or
| flipping over cars or even when trees are falling on a
| tourist tent and killing them in process has nothing to do
| with how houses are built in USA and nowadays even in UK
| and elsewhere.
| petsfed wrote:
| 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 a bit different from
| that), the world saw ~20,000 reported tornadoes. North
| America reported 12,000 of them.
|
| So its not just that Americans maybe don't know how to
| build tornado resistant structures. Its that the US and
| Canada's per-capita tornado rate is quite a bit higher than
| the rest of the world.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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 nearly as long, but high
| intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in
| seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is
| literally underground.
| petsfed wrote:
| There's also that, but I didn't go to the effort of
| investigating the rate of various strengths. I'll bet
| their data explorer shows that aspect of the phenomenon
| too.
|
| I suspect that a major factor is that the great plains of
| North America are at a lower latitude than e.g. the
| Eurasian steppes, so 1) there are fewer people living
| there and 2) the confluence of meteorological
| circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and
| therefore a larger population of very destructive
| tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the
| world.
|
| This whole line of reasoning "Americans must be bad at
| house construction, look at all the destruction wrought
| by hurricanes/tornadoes/etc" just feels disingenuous to
| me. Like observing "look at how much better the British
| are at building volcano/earthquake proof buildings, you
| never hear about people losing their houses to lave in
| the UK!".
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and
| some wind /debris damage exactly like the blown over trees
| you mention._
|
| The insurance companies have done research on the topic
| (including building giant 'labs' with a large number of
| fans)
|
| * https://fortifiedhome.org/research/
|
| and have developed standards/techniques that home
| builders/owners can do to fix a bunch of problems, starting
| with roofing:
|
| * https://fortifiedhome.org
|
| * https://fortifiedhome.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020-FORTIFIED-...
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd-0yAPs6Wc
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=proGT6AtyJc
| screye wrote:
| 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.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 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.
| crawftv wrote:
| This was the whole issue. California made it illegal for
| insurance companies to raise rates, so the insurance
| companies stop renewals. Leaving everybody uninsured.
| Homeowners couldn't buy insurance at any price.
| Firaxus wrote:
| 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/what-homeowners-need-to-
| know...
| dnissley wrote:
| Illegal seems fine as shorthand though. Same with housing
| -- "illegal" to build in many instances. Not technically
| illegal of course, but enough hurdles makes it
| effectively so.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| But that's not what it's said
| wrfrmers wrote:
| 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.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| It does seem like it's time to stop letting this
| "industry" profit off the misfortune of its customers.
| Making all of these a public service instead of private
| industry makes sense at this point.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| The profit margins on insurance are usually pretty slim.
| Insurance companies are generally not well differentiated
| from one another, so they have few avenues to compete
| other than on price. A state-run insurance plan also has
| to operate at a profit/surplus or else it will have to be
| subsidized by the taxpayers. The effect is the same
| either way.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| Slim from a percentage of total premiums but substantial
| when looking at the absolute dollar amount of profits.
| It's all relative to the size of the pie.
| bruce511 wrote:
| The absolute value is only meaningful when compared to
| the amount of capital invested.
|
| Its also only meaningful when measured over a long period
| which takes good years and bad years into account.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Ironically they don't profit off the misfortunate
| customers. Those ones typically get back more than their
| premiums.
|
| They profit off the fortunate customers, those who have
| no need to claim from insurance.
| ben_w wrote:
| As a British citizen by birth, I'm amused by the idea
| that Americans may get National Insurance for houses
| before they do for healthcare.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It does seem to be backward. In my opinion, "insurance"
| is strictly about compensation for loss, and should
| absolutely be a private transaction, while preventative
| and emergency systems should probably be public.
| Healthcare coverage, despite being called "insurance," is
| really a system of preventative and emergency services,
| while California's state-run home insurance is the
| former. But this is what they get for trying to have
| price controls.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| That's a great point. We'll get public insurance for
| houses only if the legalized bribery paid by existing
| insurance companies to block public ins. is less
| effectively applied than the money blocking public health
| insurance in the US. Old people don't care because they
| have medicare at 65+, while the rest of us slubs are
| going along with whatever we can find.
|
| We get what we allow or deserve here in the US. Citizens
| United led to our current awful outcome.
| kube-system wrote:
| We have plenty of national insurance programs, including
| for both of those... but they're not both free and
| universal.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Pr
| ogr...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
| tigen wrote:
| Isn't this thing going to be subsidized by taxpayers in
| the end anyway?
|
| California already a dumb communal insurance thing, the
| "California FAIR Plan" for people who can't get insurance
| due to high risk. They force insurance companies who
| operate in the state to fund it. So basically everyone
| has to subsidize the high-risk people... but then the
| insurance companies leave.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-
| fair-pl...
| trilobyte wrote:
| As someone who's home insurer pulled out of California
| and so I had to scramble to find another carrier, I
| looked at the FAIR plan and it is completely untenable
| for most people. My insurance was already high,
| ~$2000/year for coverage that would rebuild our house,
| and under FAIR it would have gone up to $12000/year.
|
| I mostly agree with the article that insurance is
| grounded in statistical measures of risk and there's no
| point railing against it. Norms are going to have to
| adapt to increased risk and how we build homes and
| infrastructure needs to shift away from short-term, low-
| cost thinking to longer-term solutions with a higher-
| upfront cost and lower TCO given the new constraints.
| Things like burying power lines, aggressively managing
| fire danger, and homes that are built to be more sound to
| natural disasters have to become the status quo.
|
| Most of these things are already possible today. In my
| neighborhood, PG&E did an assessment and it would cost
| every homeowner on the street ~$25,000 to have the power
| lines buried. I would have opened my wallet immediately
| to reduce the fire risk, but it got caught up in politics
| and policy. When we had some renovation on our house, my
| wife and I insisted on some of the work being done in
| ways that would make the house safer and easier to
| maintain over the long work. The contractor balked at
| first saying it would cost us an extra couple of thousand
| dollars. I had to point out that an extra $3000 to make
| sure things lasted an extra 5 - 10 years and was easier
| to maintain and upgrade meant nothing. But people have to
| insist on doing better because right now the norm is to
| cut corners on everything to save in many cases a
| negligible amount of money over the life of the work or
| against the cost if there is a disaster.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| The building codes will need to reflect the new normal.
| Defensible perimeters, metal roofs and masonry or
| cementitious exteriors are a must for many areas going
| forward. Log cabins amongst the pines just aren't tenable
| in the West any more.
| Syonyk wrote:
| You say that... but a well built log cabin, with a Class
| A fire resistant roof, is rather likely to survive a
| wildfire unbothered if the ground a couple feet around it
| is kept cleared.
|
| They're simple (not a lot of corners for burning things
| to wedge in), they tend very well sealed with smaller
| windows (so less chance of a window breaking and allowing
| embers in), and the amount of thermal energy it takes to
| light a full log on fire is quite high. Radiant heat from
| a forest fire isn't going to bother a log cabin. It might
| darken the wood somewhat, but it won't light smooth logs
| on fire. Even random firebrands and such lack the energy
| to bother wood.
|
| The only concern would be a shake roof - that _would_
| catch fire easily and burn the place down. But a well
| built and "tight" roof (no massive eaves with vents into
| an attic, just minimal overhangs) of Class A fire
| resistance would work just fine.
|
| Metal roofing is not inherently fire resistant, either -
| it depends on the materials, and what's below it. Some
| metal roofing can transfer enough heat to the wood below
| to light that on fire, even without direct flame spread.
| And, non-intuitively, a lot of asphalt shingles are Class
| A fire resistant when properly installed.
|
| What doesn't work well, obviously, are the sort of
| expensive homes with "all the architectural features,"
| lots of inside corners that trap debris, and an
| incredibly complex roofline.
| bombcar wrote:
| People forget that you don't have to modify a McMansion
| to whatever requirements you're adding - you can build
| something entirely different.
|
| "Earthships" or other hobbit-hole like houses are almost
| completely fireproof as long as the entries are handled
| correctly - anything that can start a fire through three
| feet of earth is probably a volcano anyway.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A "log cabin amongst the pines" with a decent sized
| "yard" clearance area, a good roof, and where the sides
| of the house are kept reasonably moist is pretty much
| fireproof.
| woah wrote:
| Public insurance would provide no benefit. The issue in
| California is that people have built their houses in
| dangerous areas and have not taken any measures to reduce
| fire risk. The state has already set limits to how much
| insurance costs can be increased (from a past generation
| of economic illiterates who wanted to stop "middlemen
| siphoning value"). Therefore, insurance companies are
| just pulling out, which disproves the entire idea that
| they are "siphoning value", since obviously there is no
| value there to siphon.
|
| The only thing that public insurance would do is to
| provide a way for the state to incur another massive
| unfunded liability. Except, unlike healthcare or pensions
| which have the somewhat laudable goal of taking care of
| poor people and old people, this would go to bailing out
| rich homeowners who made a bad investment of a house in a
| flammable area and then refused to spend money on fire
| safety measures, either in their home or their
| municipality.
|
| Of course these fire zone bag holders are now clamoring
| for the state to take on their bad investments by pushing
| conspiracy theories about the evil insurance companies.
| bombcar wrote:
| The danger of the areas has not been properly accounted
| for, and now that we have a better understanding, nobody
| wants to pay what it actually costs (either in increased
| insurance, which apparently CA has limited, or building
| design changes - knock down the flammable one and build
| something impervious, or even abandoning untenable
| locations - perhaps after disaster, perhaps before).
|
| Everyone's talking about fire insurance, but the
| earthquake insurance question is even bigger and
| basically untenable in a worst-case scenario. So in that
| case, CA wised up and the state is much more earthquake
| resilient than it was 30 years ago.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Only pricing them out of unsafe homes/cars etc. I feel
| like that is probably a good thing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Public insurance. For housing_
|
| This is California's FAIR plan [1]. It's a wealth
| transfer from non-homeowners to homeowners, homeowners in
| low-risk areas to high-risk homeowners, and from low-
| value homeowners to rich ones.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_FAIR_Plan
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| I'd finish your comment with "it's a goal of most US
| politicians ... to _enrich_ the most wealthy Americans ".
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| These aren't black swan events. These are swan events, if
| anything.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's so interesting to see the people in awe of that "fire
| hurricane" video in L.A....
|
| We had a way more intense drought than they in my city last
| year (theirs are not that intense). We also had 50 km/h
| winds. We also had higher temperatures... And all of those to
| levels that we never saw before. Also, we have more trees in
| our cities. We had new "fire hurricane" videos every week
| (normally, every other year somebody films one).
|
| And we had to evacuate dozens of homes, luckily no one was
| destroyed and people could return 2 months later.
| taeric wrote:
| It rather blunts your point when 50km/h winds are a far cry
| from 160km/h winds.
|
| Specifically, I'm now questioning if your drought was
| actually more intense. Not exactly sure how you measure
| that one.
| vantassell wrote:
| You're comparing apples to oranges.
|
| A Santa Ana wind is extremely dry and this one hit 100kmh
| (not 50). And it hasn't really rained for 8 months (since
| May 2024). And we had a very wet winter last year, so
| there's extra growth to fuel any fire. And finally, there's
| 10 million people live in LA County, it's a target rich
| space.
|
| Please let me know where else is having the same sort of
| fire without destroying homes.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The 50 km/h was sustained, not peak, but ok, I don't
| think we reached 100.
|
| We have 7 million people living around, and yeah, only 6
| months without a single drop of rain (19X days, where I
| don't remember what X was). Fire often destroys some
| homes, we got luck last year.
| ewhanley wrote:
| It's not a competition. Both can be sights that people view
| in awe. Are you "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" wildfires?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Look, the annual fire disasters in California are not a
| normal thing.
|
| If people just point out it's not normal, people complain
| that nowhere else has fire so nobody else understands the
| problem. If people point out similar places, looks like
| it's "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" (whatever that is). So,
| yeah, let it keep burning, whatever.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Wildfires are not the problem. They happen all the time
| without causing billion-dollar insurance claims. Insurance is
| always assets x risk. The issue is expensive flamable housing
| (assets) in a wildfire area (risk). We ask for trouble when
| we create million-dollar wooden houses surrounded by
| manicured gardens in desert enviroments. And build on a slope
| facing pervailing winds. The answer is concrete/brick houses
| with metal/ceramic rooves surrounded by sand/stone/concrete.
| Want a big green lawn? Move to the pacific northwest. Want to
| live near the beating heart of the movie industry, a town
| where it never rains? Get used to cactuses instead of rose
| gardens.
| doug_durham wrote:
| That doesn't align with the reality of these areas. To get
| insurance in these areas you have to demonstrate that you
| have created a defensible space around your house. This is
| enforced by local fire department inspections. I know this
| because I live near a fire prone area. Despite these things
| the area still burned. The problem isn't "lawns" or "wooden
| houses". In the case of the LA fires you would have had the
| burned out husks of concrete houses that would need to be
| demolished if everything was made of concrete. This was a
| black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.
| amonon wrote:
| >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.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| 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 special warning last summer,
| we had a very very dry summer and there was a period with
| low humidity and high winds for a few days, it was
| considered an unusual scenario with extreme fire risk -
| but nothing happened this time. Now that I'm writing this
| I'm wondering what I'll do if it feels like an annual
| occurrence. Another parallel, the power company warned us
| they might shut off the power to reduce risk but I guess
| it didn't get that bad.
| Aeolun wrote:
| You need only like 10 meters of concrete to stop any
| fire. Just build the houses inside.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I've seen fires skip valleys miles wide.
|
| Are you suggesting we build houses inside concrete cubes
| with walls 10 m thick?
| bdauvergne wrote:
| From the recent events in California I have seen many
| photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around. I think
| those houses were especially flammable more than some
| vegetation around it seems. After the fire nothing
| remained but the chimneys. I have never seen any house
| burn like that in Europe.
|
| I live along the Mediterranean sea in France, many wood
| fires every summer, with wind above 100km/h; never seen
| so many houses burn like in California even when most of
| our houses are concrete but with wooden framework.
|
| I'm pretty sure that if houses were built like here
| (concrete / concrete blocks with terracota tiles on
| wooden framwork) at lot less would have burnt. Maybe
| those near the wooded slopes but not in the middle of a
| neighborhood block.
| 0u89e wrote:
| I have looked on some videos of how those good looking US
| houses have plastic drainage, plastic material roof
| cladding and plastic panels inside and outside. And the
| first thing that I was thinking - those burn in an event
| of house fire. But I see more ond more building materials
| that were used in US now offered and being standard in
| building here in Europe, so most probably some of the
| newer houses in an event of fire will burn down in
| similar fashion. I'm just wondering if the commenter that
| mentioned "black swan event"(a very popular theme in
| Russia and unrelated to wildfires) actually understands
| that USA has plastic houses everywhere and nothing will
| change - new mansions will be rebuilt in burned areas
| with the same materials, but because they are going to
| offer them as fireproof branded, they will cost more.
| That's all - these areas won't be abandoned, because
| location, location and location is the only thing that
| matters in property business and in your property value.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > I'm just wondering if the commenter that mentioned
| "black swan event"(a very popular theme in Russia and
| unrelated to wildfires)
|
| What does this mean, "popular theme in Russia"
| martijnvds wrote:
| The Grenfell tower fire comes to mind regarding flammable
| cladding. Not "new" but "renovated".
|
| It killed more than 70 people.
| Arelius wrote:
| Yeah, but it's California, so I'm not sure concrete is
| great for the earthquakes.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _From the recent events in California I have seen many
| photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around._
|
| I think some of that can be attributed to the fact that
| buildings are stationary structures that have ample
| square-footage for embers to land and cause fires, where
| as trees have less stationary surface area for embers to
| land, remain and build into fires.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Despite these things the area still burned.
|
| I suspect the rules for making a defensible house were
| wrong. For example, I read an article recently that
| posited that most of the fire was spread by burning
| embers on the wind, and _not_ by intense heat from nearby
| flames.
|
| The idea is to look at where embers accumulate and
| eliminate or fireproof those areas. For example, a low
| masonry wall a few feet from the house can stop a lot of
| heavier burning embers from piling up against the house.
| If you've got a swimming pool, add a pump to it that
| feeds sprinklers in the yard and on the rooftop.
|
| There are a lot of homes that did not burn - look at them
| and figure out why they didn't burn.
|
| For a related example, every airplane crash is looked at,
| and we always discover overlooked vulnerabilities. The
| tsunami that devastated Japan a few years ago also
| provided a lot of information about what worked and
| didn't work.
|
| We're a long way from needing to give up. There's a lot
| of low hanging fruit.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Sure, but that's how it already works. The airplane
| example is how building codes generally work. London
| didn't rebuild in wood after the Great Fire, to give an
| ancient, and large-scale, example.
|
| From what I've read, the houses in LA that did survive
| were modern or heavily remodeled houses incorporating
| recent code changes to prevent embers from entering the
| eaves and suchlike.
|
| It really doesn't help that most of LA was built up in
| the early to mid 20th century; requiring code updates
| during remodels can only help so much, because if the
| cost/change is too much/invasive the homeowners either
| don't remodel at all or do it without permits, bypassing
| the more costly safety improvements.
| woah wrote:
| The reality is the fires didn't make it far into the city
| grid sections of LA proper. This is because these areas
| have less flammable material, and are more defensible.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Those protections are all about keeping a structure from
| catching fire. That is different than designing a
| structure not to burn. A wooden house surrounded by fire
| protection is OK under current rules. But it is still
| wood and will, eventually, burn when faced by a wild fire
| on all sides. A house built out of
| rock/brick/concrete/sand will not. We need to go beyond
| flamability and start reducing the actual number of
| calories availible to be burned.
| smileysteve wrote:
| A forward looking (part of a) solution for Malibu would be
| the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few
| houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks.
|
| This solves the fire problem AND the limited access to a
| public resource that is common in Malibu.
|
| Ideally a permeable surface without any growth, cleared at
| least 2x a year.
| ryao wrote:
| Legal Eagle claims that embers can travel up to 2 miles:
|
| https://youtu.be/5h1H36rdprs?t=1m51s
|
| That would easily jump a 10' fire break.
| 8note wrote:
| houses however, survived with much smaller fire breaks.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-
| TlYxm9g&pp=ygUkaG91c2VzIHR...
|
| especially for this fire, jumping doesnt mean that
| everything 2 miles down wind also burned down. buildings
| that far had the opportunity to burn, and if they dud,
| had the opportunity to burn their neighbors, and another
| 2 miles down.
|
| i imagine ember density is more interesting than
| distance?
| jrpt wrote:
| That would not have solved the problem in this fire since
| wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers
| traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would
| not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is
| how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can
| be made safer, like being underground in some places.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The break would need a low masonry wall to stop embers
| from being pushed along the ground.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every
| few houses. Prescribed 10 ' wide fire breaks_
|
| Ooh, and make a bailout conditional on homeowners (or
| counties) agreeing to eminent domain.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I would prefer no bailouts.
|
| If insurance wants firebreaks for insurance, that is
| their choice.
|
| If the city wants buy RE for access, that is between tax
| payers and the land owners. Cash talks
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Why is the answer not Japan's approach. My understanding is
| that because of high incidents of natural disaster they
| see/build homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as
| long-lasting investments.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Partially because that story about Japan is incorrect.
|
| In reality, it is Japanese condos that get gutted
| periodically or when sold, and it's driven by their real
| estate tax code.
|
| Japan takes enormous effort to prevent and mitigate
| natural disasters.
|
| There may have been some truth to it 200 years ago, with
| the idea that wood was the only economical way to build a
| house that could last.
| ryao wrote:
| I recall reading somewhere that the Indians had done
| controlled burns before Europeans settled in the parts of the
| U.S. where fires are now a problem. European settlers who
| displaced them did not continue the controlled burns and then
| fires became a problem. Apparently, if you do regular
| controlled burns, the severity of fires is reduced and
| healthy trees survive it. When you do not, when fires do
| occur, all trees die and the fires spread out of control.
| 0u89e wrote:
| I recall reading the same thing, however I do recall that
| they were East coast native Indians, that cleared oak tree
| forests as a hunting grounds, so completelly unrelated to
| the problem in California. The story was about native land
| rights and if such looking after their hunting grounds can
| be seen as claims on property rights, which Indians did not
| knew as a concept, so it is a moot point anyway. The issues
| that plague CA seems to be chaos in organization level -
| from what I have read these wildfires are happening in the
| year, that did had moderate drought(compared to others), so
| I would look suspiciously in this with the mind, that if
| politicians are blaming climate, then it is a sign that
| they are absolutelly responsible for what they have not
| done and promised to people. But I do not own a house there
| and I have not voted for these people and I absolutelly
| would not hang them in the chimney of my house.
|
| PS Also, there are many opportunists, that were burning
| their houses to receive insurance or compensations, so not
| all of those houses were burned by wildfires. It all looks
| ugly, regadless from what angle you look, because if there
| is no responsibility - even from the ones that have taken
| upon resposibility, then catastrophe is expected - sooner
| than later.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| 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.
| HankB99 wrote:
| I recall seeing a documentary on TV about this. Indigenous
| Americans were behind the effort to resurrect the practice.
|
| https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-
| practices-...
| rs999gti wrote:
| > The truth is that the rich diversity and stunning
| landscapes of places like Yosemite and other natural
| environments in the United States were intentionally
| cultivated by Native Americans for thousands of years. And
| their greatest tool was fire.
|
| https://www.history.com/news/native-american-wildfires
| bparsons wrote:
| Wildfire structure losses can be mitigated with cutting
| firebreaks, building material selection and removing
| flammable trees and plants from properties. A lot of
| communities in western Canada have learned this the hard way.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Theory: Damages in the USA have gone up because mold
| mitigation was incorporated as a serious consideration only
| fairly recently. If you increase your definition of what
| damage is and the work required to fix it then 'damage
| occurring' will appear to suddenly go up.
| rsynnott wrote:
| America isn't the only place having an uptick in extreme
| weather events, though.
| tedivm wrote:
| Spain just had the worst flooding ever, Australia has massive
| wildfire issues, coastal areas all over the world are
| flooding, inland areas are dealing with drought. It's
| definitely not just the US.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Climate change is gonna be really expensive. Some people
| have tried to point this out.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The problem is liability, to an extent; if you imagine a
| perfect market system, then maybe it would fix climate
| change; the parties responsible would be on the hook to
| pay for their externalities, so would be incentivised to
| stop producing them. In the real world, ah, not so much,
| though I do wonder if we'll see insurers/reinsurers
| attempting to sue big CO2 emitters in the near future.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| "Pakistan floods: One third of country is under water -
| minister"
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62712301
| atlintots wrote:
| Pakistan mentioned! Let's go!!
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| A key issue in the LA fires was bad management at all levels of
| government that could have prevented an order of magnitude of
| the damage (If procedures from the past were followed).
| vantassell wrote:
| You're a fire management expert? What did LA do wrong?
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| 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 to Ghana. (City Incompetence, Fire Department
| incompetence (but partly because of cut budget)
|
| 4. Forest maintenance has been stopped. (State
| incompetence)
|
| Competent management is needed or even worse can be
| expected in future.
| electrondood wrote:
| 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?
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| 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 pressure
| needed dropped off to the point there was no longer any
| water out of the hydrants.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pacific+Palisades,+
| Los+Ang...
| manishsharan wrote:
| you seem to be asserting that you know more than the Fire
| Chief.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| I'm asserting that anybody saying anything has nothing to
| do with the actual facts. I just offered you a 2025
| aerial view of the reservoir designed to provide water at
| pressure to hydrants that is empty, for example. The Fire
| Chief warned about the effects of the defunding. [1]
|
| [1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2024/24-1600_rpt
| _bfc_12...
| doug_durham wrote:
| This is nonsense disinformation. Citations? This wasn't a
| forest fire so forest management isn't an issue.
| California makes massive investments in wild lands
| maintenance. It hasn't "stopped". Also most forest land
| in California is Federally owned. Perhaps our incoming
| president will invest some money in maintaining the
| peoples forests. This disaster deserves better responses.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean about forests not involved:
| "The fire was first reported at about 10:30 a.m. PST on
| January 7, 2025, covering around 10 acres (4.0 ha) of the
| mountains north of Pacific Palisades" [1] California
| spending money has nothing to do with the outcomes in
| reality.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Fire
| saltcured wrote:
| I imagine they're rejecting the word "forest" to describe
| the landscape there. Locals would reserve the word
| "forest" for the coniferous zone of much higher elevation
| mountains. For example, the fire that destroyed Paradise,
| California some years ago was what we would all consider
| a forest fire.
|
| The wild areas near Malibu and Pacific Palisades are more
| a mixture of chaparral and hilly grassland. There may be
| some oak trees scattered about, but it feels like more
| trees exist in the private home landscaping than in the
| actual wild areas.
| jMyles wrote:
| If you actually want to know the answer to this question,
| this is a wonderful and well-researched book on the topic.
|
| https://tendingthewild.com/tending-the-wild/
| mtalantikite wrote:
| One thing I haven't seen mentioned in here is the ornamental
| planting of non-native plants all over LA, like eucalyptus
| which is highly flammable, as opposed to the native coastal
| oak, which is not. All those iconic, non-native palm trees are
| fire hazards.
| doug_durham wrote:
| That's because that wasn't a material effect in this
| situation. It was hurricane force winds blowing over native
| shrubs and scrub land. It wasn't forests of eucalyptus that
| caused this. California has a decades long effort to restore
| native plants in areas. Eucalyptus groves are being torn out.
| The problem is that the native shrubs and grass are pretty
| flammable. They evolved to burn and regrow. They aren't
| resistant.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| For sure, they're not fireproof of course, but they do
| survive and seem to be more resistant than non-native
| species [1].
|
| And, like all things, of course there are many
| interdependent pieces in play, like those hurricane force
| winds, but oak trees don't burn the same as a palm [2]. I
| just keep seeing that viral video of a firefighter trying
| to put out a palm while a guy escaped his house on a bike
| -- it was shedding embers like crazy. [3]
|
| [1] pdf warning: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/d
| ocuments/psw_gtr21...
|
| [2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/elderly-couple-battles-
| flames-la-f...
|
| [3] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-
| wildfires/pali...
| jollyllama wrote:
| Meh, couple this with articles about drone inspection of roofs
| and properties, and the trend of insurance getting harder to
| come by emerges.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from
| firewood in an area prone to wildfires
|
| Fireproof concrete bunkers would be worse for insurance because
| when the firestorm blows through and shatters the 7-centimeter
| windows slits your fireproof design calls for and ignites the
| interior you have to demolish steel reinforced concrete with
| machinery instead of knocking down wood with a sledgehammer and
| muscles.
|
| A Caterpillar D9 is more expensive per day than a migrant
| laborer.
|
| There are so many images of concrete buildings being burned out
| that if I search "california fires" the 9th image is of a
| steel-reinforced concrete building has ~10 meter fire jets
| blowing out one of its windows.
| trgn wrote:
| pretty much any area can get flooded though by freak rainfall
| hintymad wrote:
| 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 to live by the hills, lakes, or beaches, which is very
| much against the ideology of California?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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 population.
|
| tl;dr, though: California does allow insurers to do that, but
| is using currently an antiquated set of rules that don't
| allow for modern risk management approaches. It's been
| rewriting those rules recently to fix this; I _think_ the new
| rules are supposed to be in effect starting this year.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > 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.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| California's insurance policies are more strange, due to
| proposition 103, passed in 1988.
|
| It creates a condition where the state can prohibit
| insurers from selling to residents, if it doesn't like
| their prices, which has recently lead to a lot of insurers
| no longer selling in the state, as construction prices in
| the state have risen significantly faster than inflation,
| leading to insurance premiums that the state doesn't like.
|
| Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy
| insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than
| the plans it rejected from private insurers.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Residents who no longer have any insurers available can
| buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive
| than the plans it rejected from private insurers
|
| Sounds like a state-run racketeering business
| dlcarrier wrote:
| No, it's likely running at a loss.
| hintymad wrote:
| It was based on the report that the California government
| didn't allow the insurers to sufficiently increase their
| premiums in the burnt areas. The government (or the
| insurers) cited two reasons: there was a rule that the
| annual increase should be no more than 7%, and that if they
| want to make an exception then the insurers must increase
| the premiums for all the insured areas instead of setting
| the price by risk. As a result, the insurers stopped
| insurance renewal for about 60% of the burnt properties. I
| assume the intention is to protect the insured or to ensure
| certain equity, hence the use of the term "ideology". FWIW,
| it thought it was a neutral term, implying that it's a
| strongly held fundamental belief.
| Gigachad wrote:
| If your house burning down was a near certainty within a few
| decades, the real cost of insurance would be buying a new
| house + profit margin.
|
| Insurance only really works when most people don't suffer a
| catastrophic event and can cover the few who do.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Parts of many cities have always been in floodplains, but
| after just looking it up, it does not seem that "most cities"
| are meaningfully in floodplains. This also does not
| automatically make even the parts within a floodplain
| uninsurable, depending on the circumstances.
|
| Likewise, the level of infrastructure, tornado, and wildfire
| risk for the vast majority of the country is not sufficient
| for them to be uninsurable. "Occasionally a tornado comes
| through and gets 1 out of 10k houses" is not even a huge
| pressure on insurance prices.
|
| An
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| As for the hurricanes, stop allowing builders to build SFH in
| areas that are at or below sea level. They're going to flood.
| Period. That's not sustainable from an insurance perspective.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to
| wildfires.
|
| The alternative is to build quadruple-the-price houses out of
| brick in an area prone to earthquakes.
|
| It's much easier to repair/replace the former. And
| theoretically would be easier to avoid, if the fed would clean
| up the brush wood in their land (or give it back to the state,
| so they can manage it).
| euroderf wrote:
| Does it make any sense to talk about the foundations and the
| upper structures as being _separately_ insurable ? Can
| foundations be reused ?
| lionkor wrote:
| I assume the foundations are concrete, and the rest is wood,
| cardboard and any combination of the two, so I could see that
| the foundation would survive a fire
| infecto wrote:
| Get out of here, who is building a home out of cardboard?
| gertop wrote:
| Drywall is two sheets of paper/cardboard cladding
| (increasingly) low density gypsum.
|
| Soundproofing material is also often made of cardboard
| (though we do have alternatives for that, unlike drywall).
| infecto wrote:
| Right, so the house is not constructed out of cardboard.
| Soundproofing in my part of the US is often rockwool and
| not cardboard.
| lionkor wrote:
| Well it contains cardboard and wood, so it's made of
| cardboard and wood, among other non-flammables. If I say
| the house I live in is made of stone, brick, cement and
| rocks, obviously you know it has windows and insulation,
| and whatnot. It's still made of stone.
| infecto wrote:
| Yes of course you are right, we describe homes based on
| the component that makes up 1% of total volume. Get out
| of here with your silly statement. Drywall may have a
| layer of paper/cardboard but that does not make it a
| cardboard home. Modern exteriors often use cement board,
| with a plastic vapor barrier. We don't say the home is
| made out of plastic and wood. Saying so is just to create
| a reaction.
| infecto wrote:
| Maybe? I think its highly dependent on the age of the home and
| the willingness to reuse the outer plan to rebuild the home.
| photonthug wrote:
| > This is the intrinsic limit of political fixes: we take the
| risks and losses and transfer them to others lacking the
| political power to contest the transfer.
|
| This hits hard and close to home. While my heart goes out to
| everyone that's shouldering misfortunes, I'm wary of the "private
| profits, public risks" phenomenon getting even more out of
| control.
|
| Obviously we can't afford to disappoint all the people that were
| forced to jump into an outrageous housing market all at once,
| they need affordable insurance, and also still expect to 10x
| their property investment, particularly in coastal areas. If we
| don't do this, it will be another huge blow to the shrinking
| middle class.
|
| Meanwhile, the flyover states with fewer hurricanes and wildfires
| will subsidize coastal insurance basically due to strength of
| Californias market clout, and yet flyover states won't ever see a
| windfall from their own rising property values. Since remote
| employees in flyover states often get less salary for the same
| work, they are already subsidizing rent for higher density areas.
| Regardless of where you live, everyone should recognize that this
| is unsustainable and divisive.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Former CEO of AXA, a major French insurer, famously announced
| that a world at +4degC would be "uninsurrable" [1].
|
| That was 10 years ago.
|
| It's true that most predictions about climate are wrong - most of
| the time, they're optimistic. (Not always, fortunately [2])
|
| [1] https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/business/special-
| cop21-un...
|
| [2] https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/emissions-are-no-longer-
| fo...
| igravious wrote:
| +4degC is to the upper end of projections
|
| if it did (which is not probable) happen it'd take until the
| end of the century
|
| if we were to get there the entire world will be a different
| place; everything will have advanced so we won't be insuring
| our present world with our current knowledge and current tech
| but a future world with future knowledge and future tech
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Not everything advances. We still have houses built in the
| 1800s/1900s that are usable in predictable/similar
| climates/circumstances. A changing climate changes that.
|
| Sure, we could bulldoze everything and build new stuff that
| can handle a +2C, +3C, +4C, etc... world, but that's
| expensive.
| lm28469 wrote:
| There are 2b+ people living in "inadequate housing", don't
| have sewers, don't have running water right now, we can't
| even fix the problem now, we're not going to fix it better
| when 2b more need AC to survive every summer
|
| https://unhabitat.org/news/13-jul-2023/the-world-is-
| failing-...
| 9dev wrote:
| It's not just expensive. Steel and concrete are some of the
| largest drivers of CO2 emissions and toxic waste, in the
| ballpark of 15%! So really the only sane choice is to avoid
| building new homes whenever possible and try to keep old
| houses in use as long as possible.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's just a matter of time at that point
|
| > if we were to get there the entire world will be a
| different place; everything will have advanced so we won't be
| insuring our present world with our current knowledge and
| current tech but a future world with future knowledge and
| future tech
|
| That's a very convoluted way to spell "famine, wars and mass
| immigration". Techno-solutionism has become a religion, you
| don't even have to understand or look at the problem, just
| repeat "tech will save us all, in tech we trust".
| nostradumbasp wrote:
| Sounds super optimistic. Despite some efforts to mitigate
| climate change. Industrialists are hell-bent on removing
| regulations and consuming more power than ever. Cooling
| things is expensive and the laws of thermodynamics don't care
| about how advanced a society is.
|
| "All natural and technological processes proceed in such a
| way That the availability of the remaining energy decreases
| In all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves an
| isolated system The entropy of that system increases Energy
| continuously flows from being concentrated To becoming
| dispersed, spread out, wasted and useless New energy cannot
| be created and high grade energy is being destroyed An
| economy based on endless growth is Unsustainable"
| hb-robo wrote:
| We're up +1.5C already and it's a polynomial growth. This
| current figure was also on the "upper end" of projections
| from 25 years ago.
| graemep wrote:
| > most of the time, they're optimistic.
|
| Evidence? Has anyone collated predictions over time and
| compared them with outcomes to date?
|
| I can remember a number of specific predictions (e.g. that snow
| would be unknown in most of the UK by the early 2000s) that
| were pessimistic. Of course, I recall those because they got a
| lot of media attention at the time and the media reporting is
| biased to the most extreme predictions so its not a fair
| sample.
| soniman wrote:
| HN just had a "Whoops we undercounted plant C02 absorption by
| 40% for the last 40 years" post so I would say the errors
| mostly go in one direction.
| krisoft wrote:
| I don't understand this reasoning. How does the presence of
| a single recent post on HN say anything about if the errors
| go in one direction or in both directions?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Isn't that overly pessimistic, not optimistic?
|
| Surely if plants are absorbing _more_ CO2 than we thought,
| that 's a good thing for climate change? (More CO2 absorbed
| by plants -> less CO2 staying in the atmosphere -> less
| warming. No?)
| a3w wrote:
| I think the counting errors were "we expected these sinks
| to fill up slower. They are already full, and not
| contribute instead of being a sink".
| modo_mario wrote:
| >(More CO2 absorbed by plants -> less CO2 staying in the
| atmosphere -> less warming. No?)
|
| The vast vast vast majority of co2 absorbed by plants
| remains in the carbon cycle. The share that leaves it is
| in fact ridiculously small.
|
| There's absolutely no reasonable scenario where we wait
| for plants to deal with the output of the fossil fuels
| pumped up.
| graemep wrote:
| Most emitted CO2 also remains in the carbon cycle.
|
| What matters is accumulation at a particular point in the
| cycle because CO2 is added to the atmosphere faster than
| it is removed. If it is removed faster then it ceases to
| be a problem.
| modo_mario wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It seems to
| me the first and last line don't really add anything and
| I don't see why the middle sentence is necessarily true.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The errors on direct influences to warming have been
| overwhelming on the "too optimistic" direction. We are
| above the most pessimistic predictions from decades ago.
|
| The errors on consequences of the warming... I'm not sure
| one can even talk about them without citing specific
| studies, because those things tend to have undefined
| timeframes and way into the future contexts (like this
| 4degC one... is this even possible to achieve by burning
| fossil fuels?)
| cft wrote:
| The Third world has never been insurable. Insurance, supermarkets
| with self-checkout, home order delivery, all these things are
| only possible in high trust developed societies.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Home delivery works perfectly well in less developed society.
| As wages are so much lower it is very much cheaper to deliver
| to door and possibly even get documentation for signature. Big
| issue in the end is cost of living. Which affects everyone and
| most of things in live.
| trollbridge wrote:
| The problem with home delivery in a "low trust" area is that
| your delivered items will get stolen, unless you can manage
| to stay at home all day to receive deliveries.
| gertop wrote:
| Porch pirates are a huge problem in America and shop
| lifting has gotten so bad that many products are locked
| behind glass doors...
|
| It's wild how people here have blinders and think that
| these things only apply to "lesser" countries.
| fishstock25 wrote:
| The term "uninsurable" is not linked to "too expensive" or
| (equivalently) "too high risk". It's linked to "unpredictable".
|
| The business insurances are in is a business of statistics. As
| long as you can model things giving you an expected value and a
| standard deviation, you can offer an insurance policy which gives
| you X amount of profit with Y amount of risk, and the insurance
| premiums are adjusted such that the insurance's risk for negative
| profit is negligible, according to the model.
|
| What does it mean for climate change? Current insurance models
| apparently don't work well, so they don't dare to offer policies
| in certain areas. But just like city planners need to adjust
| (build further away from shore, higher up, build in flooding
| protections) and home owners do (AC, think twice if you want a
| basement) and farmers (choice of crops, irrigation systems), so
| do insurances by finding better models that allow them to have
| better statistics.
|
| My expectation in the long run is that insurances will be offered
| again, but with so high premiums for certain areas (of high risk)
| that it will just be too expensive to live there. Which is fine.
| Nobody lives on the moon either. And the public shouldn't be
| paying for somebody's privilege to have a nice waterfront
| property in a hurricane area.
|
| TL;DR: The current public discourse about this topic conflates
| predictability with cost when talking about "insurability". They
| are very different things.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| > What does it mean for climate change? ...think twice if you
| want a basement
|
| Why is climate change a problem for basements? Is it to do with
| flooding? If floods are likely to affect basements, doesn't
| that suggest an opportunity for sacrificial basements?[0]
|
| [0] "The construction of concrete ground structures or
| sacrificial basements is a recognised solution for construction
| in areas of high flood risk. The habitable spaces are raised a
| minimum of 600mm above the level of design flood risk, while
| the basement area can provide additional nonhabitable storage
| space." https://www.basements.org.uk/TBIC/Building-
| Legislation/Plann...
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Fire insurers could begin ploughing some of their take back into
| educating clients, helping them harden their homes, and making
| sure clients are up-to-date on fire codes. As the world changes,
| businesses should expect to have to remodel their product.
| stuaxo wrote:
| This is an existential problem for the insurance industry and
| they should fight the oil industry as such.
| misja111 wrote:
| Everything is insurable, it's just a matter of making the premium
| high enough. If people are willing to pay it, that's another
| question.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| If insurance and property taxes are proportional to property
| price, and property prices grow faster than incomes, then cost of
| ownership will eventually become _unaffordable_ to existing
| residents.
|
| A similar argument works if insurance is just based on
| reconstruction cost, but construction costs inflate faster than
| incomes.
|
| If properties become unaffordable, then to restore equilibrium,
| property prices must fall, incomes must rise, or lower-income
| residents will sell to higher-income purchasers. If there are few
| higher-income purchasers, property prices will fall.
|
| Property taxes could be cut, or decoupled from property values
| (e.g. poll tax), but that never happens.
|
| If the risk really is high, there is no practical insurance
| available, and all purchasers are rational, then the price may go
| to zero.
|
| An example of an irrational purchaser would be one who assigned
| high status to a beach house, even in the face of threats from
| coastal erosion, hurricane floods or tsunamis.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| I don't disagree, but...
|
| > Property taxes could be cut, or decoupled from property
| values (e.g. poll tax), but that never happens.
|
| Couldn't the total property tax take be set to be proportional
| to incomes, shared between households in proportion to property
| price?
|
| > If the risk really is high, there is no practical insurance
| available, and all purchasers are rational, then the price may
| go to zero.
|
| Rational purchasers might reason that:
|
| 1) they need a home
|
| 2) unless they own a home they'll have to rent
|
| 3) even an uninsurable home could be expected to be habitable
| for a while
|
| 4) if rent for the duration of expected habitability exceeds
| transaction costs and property taxes for some uninsurable home,
| it could be worth a nonzero amount
| greenavocado wrote:
| Possibly one of the most inane phrases ever uttered about
| modern governments is Oliver Wendell Holmes's oft-quoted phrase
| stating that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society."
| This reflected the naive view, often pushed in the eighteenth
| and nineteenth century, of the so-called "social contract."
|
| According to this idea, we pay taxes, and in return the state
| provides order, protection, and all the blessings of
| civilization.
|
| Presumably included among all those taxpayer-funded
| civilizational "services" provided by governments one can find
| "fire suppression."
|
| But, you wouldn't know it from watching tens of thousands of
| residents flee their homes in southern California and Los
| Angeles County as fires rage. As of Wednesday at midday, five
| different fires in southern California are still zero-percent
| contained. Nor is this some hard-to-reach rural area with few
| roads and little infrastructure. These fires are right in the
| middle of suburban cities and towns. Yet, it is all apparently
| too much for lavishly-funded government agencies to handle.
|
| Indeed, government authorities in Los Angeles County and
| California had neglected infrastructure to the point that it
| became useless in many areas in terms of battling the blazes.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| If history shows one thing- that is that a ton of political
| problems are just technological problems solvable with surplus
| bribery - and the fact that we have a ton of political problems
| indicates we have a misallocation of technological problem
| solving ability, away from what are the foundations of society,
| towards "luxury" perverted incentivized problems created by a
| wealth bubble. A million thinkers working and thinking about
| block chains instead of energy or fertilizers or carbon capture.
| This bubble and its misallocation shadow has to die, for the
| system to reboot.
| thrance wrote:
| Again, insane that the president elect does not believe in
| climate change and chose to blame supposed DEI practices in
| California's firefighters _while the fire was burning_.
|
| Nothing will change, houses will be rebuilt the same way in the
| same place.
| amelius wrote:
| As long as so many things are not accounted for properly
| (negative externalities), what good is it to talk about the world
| being insurable or not? It's like putting a bunch of monkeys in
| the cockpit of a rocket and then asking if you can insure it.
| bArray wrote:
| From my personal experience in the UK, a few annec-data points:
|
| A friend owns a Land Rover with such a notoriously bad engine
| that insurers refuse to insure it. Land Rover had to make their
| own car insurance [1].
|
| Another friend owns an electric car that is becoming increasingly
| uninsurable. I'm told that due to the battery, any significant
| collision defaults to a complete destruction of the vehicle and
| not a repair. The second-hand market for electric cars is also
| terrible, almost no car dealer will touch them in the UK.
|
| Another friend had a car that was insured for PS5k, but it was
| actually worth more. An accident occurred that completely
| destroyed the car in a fire, and they offered PS1.5k. They
| approached the insurer and said if PS1.5k is adequate to replace
| the vehicle, then they could simply drop a vehicle off instead.
| Eventually they increased the amount to PS2.5k, half of their own
| estimate, and far less than the vehicles actual worth.
|
| Another friend got into an accident and was permanently injured.
| They got an initial offer from the other insurance company, which
| their insurance said to decline as they believed they should
| expect more. Several years of slow progress, with the original
| insurer shutting down and passing their work to several other
| insurers, they were told too much time had elapsed and they
| should have gone for the original amount. They offered a PS50
| "good will gesture" and then closed the case. In the UK we have
| the Financial Ombudsman for insurance disputes [2], which after
| review decided that PS50 was perfectly adequate.
|
| Another friend had their vehicle temporarily ceased by the police
| (the police were wrong to do so in this case, but you have zero
| right to appeal). They lost one of the sets of keys for the
| vehicle and scratched the car. The police told the person there
| was nothing they could do, and to claim on the insurance. They
| instead paid for the damage themselves, because the insurance
| premiums on such a claim would not be worth it. Just tonight I
| saw something similar where somebody's mirror was damaged in a
| hit & run, choosing to fix it themselves to avoid insurance
| premiums increase.
|
| I used to send out parcels and insure them, but several parcels
| arrived damaged (admitted by the couriers) and they said they
| needed proof of packaging the items correctly. From therein I
| would video the packaging of all items and something occurred
| again, but they made it impossible to actually use their
| insurance.
|
| My point is this: Getting insurance is becoming increasingly
| difficult, but also getting the insurer to honour their agreement
| is becoming increasingly difficult. In the UK you are legally
| required to have car insurance, but they are clearly robbing
| people with no recourse to justice. The system is already broken
| and not fit for purpose.
|
| [1] https://insurance.landrover.co.uk/
|
| [2] https://www.financial-
| ombudsman.org.uk/consumers/complaints-...
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Some years ago I contracted for a mega-big-global insurance
| company.
|
| They would spread leaflets/internal publications on "Risk Profile
| for the Year 20##" every year. And they would issue updates every
| Q or H.
|
| Insurance companies monitor every-little-thing. If it hasn't
| rained for X days in Z country, they KNOW IT, monitor it, and
| accordingly change policies, premiums, etc.
|
| I always tell people that the most lucrative job (imho) is
| "Actuary" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuary) so for anyone
| who is young enough to make a career change or have kids on the
| verge of picking directions/professions, "Actuary" for-the-win!!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's a financial problem, ultimately. Living in Antarctica is
| difficult and expensive because of the conditions, but with
| enough money it's manageable.
|
| California is not very hospitable on its own but with human
| intervention it was made liveable. But that is now running out,
| because e.g. the water supply is no longer adequate for what is
| used.
|
| But this is the difficult situation we find ourselves in; due to
| climate change, hospitable areas are no longer hospitable, and
| while you can throw money at the problem, it becomes
| exponentially more expensive to continue to live there. If this
| continues, it will trigger a (mass) migration. This can be
| applied everywhere, and the phrase "climate change will trigger
| mass migrations" has been uttered many times already. It however
| feels like people only considered this to be a problem in e.g.
| the global south, affecting poor people because they don't have
| the financial means to shape the earth and their living
| conditions by throwing money at the problem.
|
| I live in the Netherlands that for hundreds of years has thrown
| money and resources at the problem that it's below sea level and
| prone to flooding. We're still managing, but still get flooding
| in some places due to e.g. heavy rains deeper in Europe. But if
| the sea level goes up enough, either we'll have to spend billions
| in building higher sea walls... or abandon regions entirely. The
| worst case predictions mention a 2.5 meter sea level rise by
| 2100, that'll definitely test our infrastructure to put it
| mildly.
|
| (this comment was a reply first but moved it to a top level one
| because I added my main article comment as well).
| anovikov wrote:
| Real solution: assess risks and mandate building houses that can
| withstand those risks. Hurricanes? Find out what is the maximum
| possible hurricane and mandate construction standards that a
| house will withstand it with minimum damage (24" reinforced
| concrete walls etc). Same for fire.
| giorgioz wrote:
| 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 to spray water on fire remotely (it's done in Spain
| on the edge of forests and urban areas) 7) Pass on the costs of
| maintaining of living in expensive risky areas to the people
| living there and/or give them benefits to move to unpopulated
| areas with no risk
|
| 1) Not all the world will suffer equally from climate change. The
| parts that are at higher risk should not be insurable so that new
| housing will not be built there but somewhere else.
|
| 2) The idea there won't be water because it doesn't rain it's
| ridiculous. We live on a planet literally made of water. We'll
| develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough
| water. We need to keep investing and improving that technology. I
| think having water artifically priced at a low price won't help
| the development of the desalinification industry. So water should
| cost more NOW that we can afford it to reflect the R&D cost of it
| that we must make to have water later.
|
| 5) Hot countries don't tend to have plenty of wood to build with.
| Forests grow with more rain. Building with wood in Spain and
| Italy is very rare. LA got his wood shipped from somewhere
| further out. Let's build with other materials in arid fire-prone
| zones. Yes it's perfectly possible to have houses that are both
| more-fire-resistant and more-earthquake resistant.
| drysine wrote:
| > We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and
| have enough water.
|
| And then you'll have the brine problem.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I'm asking naively and honestly: is there a solution to
| brine? Believe it's pumped directly back into ocean at the
| moment.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Desal plants use static mixers to mix the brine with a
| bunch of ocean water and pump it back out. The specifics
| depend on the local ecology and ocean currents but it's a
| matter of making the outfall pipes long enough (they're
| kilometers long usually).
| giorgioz wrote:
| Two step forwards one step back. Doesn't mean the step back
| made the two step forward not good. I was not familiar with
| the concept of brine. I thought we would extract the salt
| from the water and store it. Maybe use it for construction
| material like with the CO2 extracted from the atmosphere. I'm
| not an expert and I might have the Dunning-Kruger effect on
| this. It might be a lot harder than I can imagine/know at
| this moment but it might still be worth it and necessary.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| brine can be used for mineral extraction.
| tills13 wrote:
| I'm guessing there's local ecology issues with this?
| Groundwater seepage, etc. Though that hasn't really stopped
| fracking so maybe it'll just be a non-issue at the policy
| level.
| horrible-hilde wrote:
| and storing cheese
| nojvek wrote:
| 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.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Wildfires can be avoided by not building wood structures in
| places that historically have had frequent wildfires. A good
| way to incentivise this is very high insurance costs, which
| lenders will require before granting a mortgage. Governments
| can also enact fire codes.
|
| Buildings can be built out of less fire prone materials, and
| surrounding non native vegetation avoided which feeds fires.
| This does mean someone can't live in LA as if they are in a
| New England country town.
| pc86 wrote:
| Wildfires can also be avoided by letting forest management
| people dictate forest management policies instead of
| environmental activists, and by prioritizing the people
| that live there over the animals.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Forestry management seems like a suitable state level
| activity that should have civilian/legislative oversight
| but also a fair bit of freedom for experts to do their
| jobs.
| giorgioz wrote:
| You are right. I live in Europe and I'm not very familiar
| with hurricanes. I'm more familiar with fires and
| earthquakes. It seems some parts of Florida have been hit by
| catastrophes every 2-5 years. Maybe we should treat the whole
| space as natural reserves and building less there. I saw a
| lot of houses constructured right on the beach in Florida
| that they seemed just looking for trouble.
| giorgioz wrote:
| 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 hope
| we can both do that and not having to live like austerity
| monks.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > 1) Not all the world will suffer equally from climate change.
| The parts that are at higher risk should not be insurable so
| that new housing will not be built there but somewhere else.
|
| So what about the people who already live there...? Like I'm
| fine telling millionaires their coastal cottages are fucked,
| but there's a lot more folks out there who've lived in these
| areas for generations both because they're attached to them
| emotionally, and also because they can't afford to go anywhere
| else.
| giorgioz wrote:
| I know, is sad :( Tough choices must be made. Like many of
| our ancestors, we will have to migrate to better places
| and/or adapt. We'll do all we can to make it work. As
| personal advice, I will be buying my second home (when I'll
| be able to afford it) somewhere in a different country/region
| with different climate (and political) connotations. Avoid
| having all the eggs in the same basket. I think we should all
| have 2nd/3rd homes and also Airbnb them to be more efficient.
| If all would rent their 2nd/3rd homes the supply would exceed
| demand and the price would drop. I think we really need to
| use smart-locks remotely openable in a bigger scale. We could
| have a future of prosperity and abbundance with enough
| redundancy to accomodate for all the distasers we were not
| able to mitigate enough.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I have a very visceral response to people who say things
| like "tough choices must be made" when it's notable that
| they will not be making those tough choices, nor will have
| those tough choices impact them, and will instead be
| apparently playing musical homes for the best personal
| outcome.
|
| Like I'm glad your personal wealth is going to let you
| skate out of the worst effects of climate change (so you
| think/for now). That is far from a universal experience and
| "tough choices need to be made" in this context sounds a
| hell of a lot like euphemistic language for "a lot of poor
| people are going to die, at least if they're too poor to
| afford to rent my spare homes."
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing
| to make!"
|
| - Originally Lord Farquaad, emulated by every modern
| billionaire
| tim333 wrote:
| >"We will find new solutions to a new problem"
|
| Fire risk isn't that new. London famously largely burnt down in
| the great fire of 1666 and the solution was to build stuff that
| doesn't burn as easily. It's not really a new science.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| The question this article seems to ask is "is the world becoming
| insurable while maintaining a profit margin?", not "is the world
| becoming uninsurable?" These are different questions, with
| different answers.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Insurance profit margins are razor thin. Many insurers pay out
| more in claims than they collect in premiums, and the
| difference is made up with interest and other returns on
| investments from the insurer's massive reserves.
|
| Insurers are strictly regulated at the state level. They have
| to keep enough reserves to pay a surge in claims. And they have
| to collect enough premiums to pay out an average claim volume,
| or else the state requires them to shut down.
| jopsen wrote:
| > The other way the world is becoming uninsurable is much of what
| we take for granted--abundant, affordable resources, products,
| food and fuel, for example--is not guaranteed, and cannot be
| insured by political or technological means.
|
| Fuel is not guaranteed, but renewables, batteries, heat pumps,
| EVs and possible nuclear does increasingly give us a
| technological option for ensuring power.
|
| It's fair to ask if economics will drive us to adopt these
| technologies on a wide enough scale before we run out.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I'm not sure how heat pumps and batteries "ensure power".
| Building far more nuclear would create green jobs, high paying
| jobs, and ensure widespread power, but the current trend is to
| close nuclear power plants and burn natural gas instead.
| benrutter wrote:
| Really interesting reading - looks like there's _a lot_ of
| comments here along the lines of things that could be done to
| build more fire /flood/huricane resistant housing.
|
| I don't want to detract away from those points, but it's
| definitely worth saying that, at present, we're polluting CO2
| into the atmosphere at a very large and to some extent avoidable
| rate. Climate change is already happening, but the extent to
| which it happens is still down to us - we can and need to do lots
| to improve flood resistance in, say, Florida, but we can also
| stop parts of Florida ending up below sea level too.
| richrichie wrote:
| Not one paper cited. Just random recitation of climate change
| hysteria tropes.
|
| Life on earth had dealt with 120 meters of sea level rise. So
| please.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| What amazes me about watching californians interviewed about the
| wild fires is the discourse heads towards conspiracy and
| corruption:
|
| - It's all part of planned land grabs and clearances - They don't
| want to pay to protect us
|
| And so on. Nobody once mentioned the real driving factor of
| increasing incidences of natural disaster: climate change.
|
| I wouldn't insure that attitude either.
| spjt wrote:
| I also know almost nothing about insurance other than what I've
| observed as a policyholder. Two things I would note though:
|
| 1) Maybe there needs to be some adjustments to how risk pooling
| is done. I live in Florida, so my homeowner's insurance is
| ridiculously expensive, but my property isn't really at risk from
| hurricanes etc, being very far inland. Realistically my property
| isn't any more at risk of anything than any property anywhere
| else in the country.
|
| 2) There doesn't seem to be enough flexibility in the offers.
| Most people seem to think insurance should cover any losses, but
| really people only need insurance to cover losses that they
| cannot recover from. I'd take a $100K deductible on my
| homeowner's insurance if it was offered and lowered my premiums
| significantly, but it's my understanding the law won't allow
| that.
| dskrvk wrote:
| Bloomberg recently did an excellent series on just this issue
| (including insurers of last resort in different states). The
| first part: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-home-
| insurance-real-...
| danans wrote:
| > Risks and losses cannot be extinguished, they can only be
| transferred to others.
|
| At least for risks like wildfires, we can reduce future risk by
| rebuilding homes using wildfire resistant techniques and
| materials.
|
| The problem in LA (exacerbated by the climate-change driven
| conditions) was that most of the burned neighborhoods were built
| adjacent to fire prone wildlands during an era when homes were
| _built like matchboxes_ , almost designed to burn. Add the
| hurricane strength wind, and each building became a blowtorch.
|
| Fiber cement siding, minimal eaves, and metal roofs are
| straightforward ways to reduce wildfire contagion risk of
| buildings. There have been numerous experiments done to
| demonstrate how effective this approach is at significantly
| reducing combustibility of buildings.
|
| Cutting back trees near houses to create defensible space is also
| pretty straightforward.
| runeks wrote:
| I'm no insurance expert, but I know that insurance usually
| doesn't cover what's called _force majeure_ -- ie. "great
| forces" such as natural disasters. That's because insurance
| doesn't work if all insurees (or a large proportion) need to be
| compensated at the same time.
|
| So my question is: is it even possible to insure against these
| events -- e.g. hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes -- given
| that all insurance takers may need to collect compensation at
| once (in which case the price of a house insurance would need to
| be at least the same as the price of a new house).
| prmoustache wrote:
| I think the best solution is to own much less.
|
| People keep wanting to live in huge space that they barely use,
| then buy a fuckton of appliances they use once or twice a month
| at the maximum and hoard stuff like there is no tomorrow. Then
| they cry when they lose everything or that nobody want to insure
| their pile of crap. Just insure the minimum to live comfortably.
| It is much lower than what you can think of.
|
| Since I have been moving every 4 to 5 years I have been focusing
| on never hoarding too much stuff. My appartment can burn, I will
| be fine and as long as I can find a small roof[1] for me and my
| family (1 partner 2 teenagers) and we could buy back what we need
| to live comfortably with less than 10kEUR and then rebuild
| gradually to live in a normally sized[2] appartment/house.
|
| [1] by my standards, which I rate at 20 to 25sq/m per person
| living in the household.
|
| [2] a bungalow, yurt, caravan or large camper would be enough for
| a disaster recovery.
| lazystar wrote:
| > Then they cry when they lose everything
|
| Yes, that's a normal human response. It's ok to have emotions.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Yes but OTOH between drugs/addiction, homelessness, traffic,
| healthcare, consequences of global warming, loneliness
| epidemy, crime, it is hard to have empathy when you see a
| whole country complaining of self induced misery.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Something neat about the insurance industry is that it seems to
| be immune to irrationality. Whether or not someone believes in
| climate change, premiums are a function of actual measured risk.
| If risk goes up, premiums go up.
|
| And because being accurate at assessing risk is directly
| connected to company performance, they're likely one of the best
| places to go to get your finger on the pulse of what's actually
| happening.
|
| The one time this falls apart is when the government puts their
| finger on the scale and creates insurance that runs at a loss so
| that people can keep rebuilding in practically uninsurable
| locales.
|
| I guess another nice thing about this is that the insurance
| company and you both have aligned incentives. Neither of you want
| to see claims being made. So they really care that you're doing
| whatever you can to reduce risk.
|
| I bet some of this is wrong, based on an incomplete read of the
| system, so please educate me. :)
| lasermike026 wrote:
| Insurance needs to be not-for-profit or a government enterprise.
| Physical projects and infrastructure should not be started until
| risk is assessed. Speculators and go-go finance has ought to be
| constrained. As for myself, I am choosing alternative ways to
| plan, finance, build, and manage infrastructure project. The
| current systems is a non-starter for most people under 50.
| rs999gti wrote:
| > Insurance needs to be not-for-profit or a government
| enterprise.
|
| There are many examples of this in the insurer of last resort,
| which are non-profit or government insurance when the private
| insurance can no longer cover.
|
| Insurers of last resort have the same issues with denying
| claims and not paying out like the private insurers. If you
| read the OP article, the only people asking for not-for-profit
| or government insurance are basically asking for infinite
| money, which is both a non-starter and impossible.
|
| What really should be done is private insurers raising premiums
| to match risk. This may mean some consumers will be priced out
| of insurance policies.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > the entire idea of being an "insurer of last resort" is based
| on an unlimited supply of money to fund losses that no longer
| make financial sense
|
| Key insight here. Insurer of last resort == bag-holder for
| negative EV proposition.
| pc86 wrote:
| Insurer of last resort == taxpayers bailing out people who can
| no longer afford to live in their multi-million dollar
| properties but refuse to sell and move.
| njovin wrote:
| TBF the best example of a program like this that currently
| exists is the National Flood Insurance Program which covers
| many sub-multi-million dollar homes and is billions of
| dollars in the hole.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's a pretty astounding mix of "being the most expensive
| insurer that exists for a particular parcel" _and_
| "completely unable to fulfill its obligations in the event
| of any medium- or large-scale disaster." Hence my use of
| the term bailout.
| teeray wrote:
| The problem is that in American home-buying, insurance is often
| compulsory for a purchase with a mortgage. This makes sense from
| the bank's perspective--they want to insure their collateral.
| However, the system doesn't really have an answer for "what
| happens when their collateral becomes uninsurable?" Even though
| lenders have force-placed insurance, even those insurers can deny
| coverage in certain circumstances (e.g. flood plain). This puts
| insurers in a position to de-facto foreclose on not just one
| person's house, but swaths of houses in regions they (as an
| industry) deem risky.
|
| I'm not sure what the answer is here other than forcing insurers
| to insure (which would raise premiums for everyone), or creating
| meta-insurance of some kind (insurance against becoming
| uninsured).
| trollbridge wrote:
| If a property is uninsurable, it can be bought for cash. The
| actual land value can still be mortgaged, too.
|
| Would you want to hold collateral that has a high risk of
| becoming worthless? You would effectively be self insuring it
| and would have to price that into a loan you offered.
| teeray wrote:
| > Would you want to hold collateral that has a high risk of
| becoming worthless?
|
| Of course not, the problem is that all parties were a-okay
| with the purchase in the first place, and the banks are
| trying to change the terms when they realize their hand is a
| losing one after many turns of the game. Sometimes that's
| life, and the corporations should be forced to lose instead
| of changing the rules so the homeowner loses instead.
| trollbridge wrote:
| The rules are that you have to maintain casualty insurance
| in your property in order to keep the mortgage. If you
| don't want to do that, the lender will try to obtain
| insurance on its own and bill you for it.
|
| The bank is actually the loser here. Property becomes
| uninsurable, they still hold the collateral, and the
| borrower can simply walk away on a non-recourse state like
| California.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| What I see happening in the future is builders will stop
| building homes in highly disaster prone areas because those
| places cant secure insurance and thus potential owners won't be
| able to secure a mortgage, and the only folks living there will
| be the very wealthy that can afford to self-insure.
|
| There are some areas like CA where natural disaster risk can be
| mitigated through forest management and I think those places
| will continue to grow, but for places where we can't do
| anything to impact a natural disaster (ie hurricane's in
| florida), those places will start to have "off limit" zones for
| any type of insurable construction. These places will still be
| accessable, we will just build parks, beaches and other things
| there for the public, just not homes or commercial structures.
|
| I think a big part of why natural disasters have gotten so bad
| is one climate change but also the fact that we're building
| places we shouldn't and in the future most will learn the
| lesson to no build in a certain area unless they are made of
| money and are aware of the risks of building their.
| cormorant wrote:
| There's always some price at which an insurer would willingly
| insure. The only case where it is "impossible" is when there's
| a government price cap. The other issue that you implicitly
| refer to, though, is that the price of insurance can be altered
| annually, while the mortgage term is much longer. This mismatch
| creates "what happens when their collateral becomes [so
| expensive to insure that the homeowner would never have agreed
| to this mortgage deal on these terms upfront]?"
| uludag wrote:
| > That the private-sector can trigger crises that have no
| political or technological fix is on very few pundits' radar.
|
| Interestingly, there seems to a number of cultural solutions to
| this problem. Like, imagine if the people of LA adopted a
| fondness for living in dense urban environments, and a reluctance
| to "live near nature," the problem of wildfires becomes much more
| tractable. Or for example, a culture of maintenance (forests,
| power infrastructure, infrastructure fireproofing, risk
| preparedness, etc.), like outlined in the book "The Innovation
| Delusion," could very well reduce risk a considerable amount.
| Unfortunately our civilization is too much stuck in its
| traditional ways to consider such solutions.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| the world is always insurable
|
| the more volatile it is (and the less you've mitigated the
| risks), the more expensive your insurance gets
| 1attice wrote:
| This seems willfully naive.
|
| As with any market, there will be a price that the market
| cannot bear; and if your 'floor', your minimum policy price
| offering, is too high for your market, then insurance (as an
| asset class) no longer has product-market fit.
|
| QED.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The really issue is that most people don't understand insurance.
|
| People reduce or stop caring when they know insurance will cover
| things. In my opinion this leads to higher losses and higher
| costs. Especially when people choose more expensive things.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > If the state or federal government offers an open checkbook--
| we'll pay any and all losses, no questions asked--then those
| ultimately paying these astronomical bills--the taxpayers--will
| reasonably ask: why are we subsidizing people to rebuild in
| places that are clearly no longer habitable due to the
| probabilities of another fire, flood or hurricane?
|
| There's two options:
|
| 1: Pay people to leave, perhaps 80% of the fair market value as
| of a certain date.
|
| 2: Pay people for their loss, _but do not allow them to rebuild._
| (Unless the house is built to stricter standards, and meeting
| those standards might not be covered by the loss.)
| bagels wrote:
| The graph is potentially misleading in a few ways. Population has
| increased, more houses to get destroyed. House prices outpace
| CPI. Costs went up, but so did revenue for the above reasons.
| Obviously those factors are independent of hurricane and fire
| size and frequency.
| billfor wrote:
| As long as you have population growth without increasing land ,
| the density of people will increase and the more damage per
| square foot will increase.
| 404mm wrote:
| I live in North Texas, and I see a similar pattern in home and
| car insurance as well. Our main local threat is hail. Well, and
| the tornadoes, but while very destructive, tornadoes create
| fairly geographically limited damage. Hail can cover whole cities
| at a time.
|
| Car insurance became quite expensive. My premium is about $2,200
| / 6mo (no accidents, no speeding, no claims in about 10 years)
| for two cars and two drivers. For some reason, 80% of people
| choose to park outside while they have a 2-car garage available.
| Usually packed with crap. They find it easier to have their cars
| totaled every 4-6 years.
|
| For home insurance, my policy is almost $4,800/yr now! While
| making some coverage adjustments, I noticed that my insurance
| company no longer offers a choice of lower deductibles for
| hail/wind. It's a fixed percentage relative to my property value,
| currently showing as nearly $15k as the cheapest option. That's
| more than 50% of the replacement cost! (I know that because I had
| my roof replaced twice in the last 10 years.)
| _heimdall wrote:
| What's the rough value for your two cars?
|
| I live in a similar climate where hail and tornados are both a
| risk, though hail is a little less likely here than where you
| are.
|
| Admittedly we have cheap cars, but our car insurance for two
| drivers is closer to $850 for the year (full coverage with a
| reasonable deductible).
|
| Insurance costs have seemed to adjust to a combination of more
| severe weather conditions, but they also have to fix much more
| complicated and expensive cars today too. A simple fender
| bender can be thousands to fix, heck I recently heard about a
| $5,500 bill when a newer Ford got water in the headlight and
| fried pretty much the entire electrical system.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Do you own higher end vehicles or possibly an EV? Or you're
| seeing those sorts of rates with something like a Honda Accord?
| 404mm wrote:
| 1yo and 3yo "technically" luxury brands. But the car values
| combined is under $100k
| notatoad wrote:
| Insurance is America's best method of pricing externalities. If
| America is becoming uninsurable, maybe they should look into
| other methods of addressing or minimizing those externalities.
|
| Like requiring buildings be built to a standard where they can
| survive normal weather events, not building in disaster prone
| areas, not building in sprawling huge developments that eat up a
| ton of natural space and create a huge urban woodland interface,
| and trying to slow the pace of climate change by not dumping so
| much co2 into the atmosphere.
| lawlessone wrote:
| 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.
| amarka wrote:
| Not sure if this is accurate. It seems they're refusing to take
| the risk.
| lawlessone wrote:
| 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
| ashryan wrote:
| In my NYC neighborhood, we seem to be going through a whole slew
| of businesses closing shop within the last year and change.
|
| One obvious reason is rent hikes.
|
| But as one of my favorite local bars was closing, one of the
| staff mentioned that insurance was really starting to kill them.
|
| We don't live in a flood-prone part of NYC, so I'm curious: is
| insurance for retail space really going up dramatically across
| the board in NYC, or was this a single, subjective understanding
| of a situation?
| jlarocco wrote:
| It's possible insurance prices were rising specifically for
| them - because they had a lot of claims, for example - and not
| necessarily for everybody.
| gainda wrote:
| when i hear stories like that i think it's a ripple of effect
| of paying out for others but then i also recall seeing how much
| the industry started paying out to political interests after
| citizens united, too
| Hilift wrote:
| Yes, retail insurance is up. This is due to crime and theft. In
| some cases, it's the we don't want your business/headache rate
| hike. NYC has about 835,000 unauthorized immigrants. That is up
| from about 400,000 in 2022.
|
| https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/shoplifting-statisti...
|
| https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/02/21/shoplifting-surge-nyc-sma...
|
| https://nypost.com/2024/05/20/opinion/nyc-crime-wave-continu...
| greenthrow wrote:
| People have lost their homes and everything they own to a natural
| disaster that was not under their control. I don't care where you
| live in the world, _this could happen to you_. The lack of
| empathy and victim blaming in these comments is absolutely
| revolting. I am done with this site. It has been taken over by
| heartless people with zero intellectual curiosity. Good riddance.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| It's always been filled with smug self-important techbro
| shitlibertarians (edit: with egos more fragile than literal
| snowflakes). Luckily, what's they've sent around is starting to
| come back and they reeeeally don't like consequences.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Judging from my experience (house built in non hazard suburb and
| maintained every few years), Yes.
|
| The thing is that with the additional cost of climate change, a
| lot of these houses do not have the capacity to go through a
| once-in-100-years event, as they start to occur more frequently.
|
| We just had a water backflow from the city main pipeline last
| August. Pretty much everyone was impacted, and insurance cost
| went up for those that were not impacted anyway.
|
| So to make the house insurable, it requires: 1) massive city
| infrastructure rebuilding, and 2) everyone pays a lot more to
| install additional "modules" in their houses. For example I
| already have a backflow valve but if things get worse and water
| starts to accumulate close to the bottom of the house I'll need a
| very expensive French drain, something like 60k CAD. It's not
| going to break me, but it's 3-4 years of saving.
|
| I can't imagine what happens if we get another once-in-100-years
| storm this summer. I'll probably leave the basement bare without
| floor and won't bother to claim it.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Define uninsurable. In present world that means that someone will
| bet a lot of money nothing bad will happen to you, and you will
| pay them for long to keep that bet on. And that will work for
| that someone because the kind of bad things they give money for
| should be extremely rare, its like a reverse lotto. But if things
| become not so rare, or the unexpected rare events affect at once
| too much people, then becomes not so profitable for them.
|
| But that doesn't mean that the concept may still be valid for the
| end user in a way or another, just that in the other end you may
| have a different kind of actor or mitigation of risk. That those
| events become far more common is not random or an act of some
| god, i.e. taxes for fossil carbon usage or other economic action
| towards those actors meant to have a fund for those cases. Or
| having a personal saving plan instead of giving that money to
| someone else, that in average may work better for most. Or force
| insurance companies to keep playing even when the odds are not so
| extremely favourable for them.
| maherbeg wrote:
| Why don't insurance companies mandate significant fire abatement
| in new builds to be insurable? While it may not be possible to
| save every house, I wonder how many houses could have been saved
| with a thought behind "how can we minimize damage in a wildfire
| scenario"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In Australia, this is handled at the building code level, as
| well.
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| This is happening already, it has happened to my neighbors. As
| resident of CA in a neighborhood which previously was not, but
| now probably is, 'fire prone' I fully expect to hear from my
| insurance company to provide evidence of defendable space and
| other modifications to minimize the likelihood of structure
| fire.
|
| I've read that once more than about 5-10 house were on fire,
| there was really no hope of containment, due to the orientation
| of the streets relative to the wind, the proximity of houses,
| and the intensity of the wind. Thus the key is prevention --
| not letting the wild land fire get to the first 5-10 houses.
| skirge wrote:
| There are different stategies for risk mitigation and delegation
| is only one of them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Risks are only uninsurable if the government puts a ceiling on
| the premiums.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Probably more that we spent decades since mass adoption of AC
| moving 10s of millions of people into previously lightly
| inhabited areas, then repeatedly bailed them out with government
| money to rebuild when disaster struck.
|
| Add to that the general rich mans disease of building anything in
| America being slow & expensive, so each rebuild is more expensive
| than the last, well beyond just inflation.
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| USA != World.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| The article lumps in the L.A. fires but the exit of insurers from
| that market was due to price controls, voted in by California
| residents.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Get rid of the federal guarantee for homes that are deemed too
| risky for private insurance. Stop privatizing gains with publicly
| backed safety nets and people will engage in less risky behavior.
| But get ready to be labelled as heartless if you back or even
| suggest such.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| The title should be: Are some parts of the United States becoming
| uninsurable.
| Cypher wrote:
| I'll insure you for cost + half... it's not a matter of insurance
| it's the price of which it comes in at.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Good. Building houses in tsunami-prone areas, areas downstream of
| large dams, and in known forest fire areas is stupid and
| insurance companies get to be the little boy who says "the
| emperor has no clothes" first.
| w10-1 wrote:
| This is a great opportunity for developers to rebuild with
| greater density.
|
| It's not clear how extraordinary the losses are - by how much
| home insurance losses actually outpace home-price inflation (not
| CPI).
|
| For the moment let's set aside legitimate concerns of climate
| change or land-use policy inducing unanticipated risk.
|
| Insurance is systemic in the sense of pervasive, but the question
| is whether the crisis is a controllable excursion from stability,
| or itself amplifies the problem.
|
| The key factor in the 2008 crisis was how foreclosures reduced
| prices causing more foreclosures and higher borrowing costs - a
| vicious cycle.
|
| With insurance, homes are already affected. What other specific
| markets? Does insurance company diversification spread the impact
| from real estate costs to other industries?
|
| The destabilizing mechanism is insurer exit after over-exposure.
| Over-exposure comes not from extra assets, but from mis-pricing.
|
| US Insurance is a private market facility, so pricing is
| competitive. If a competitor prices insurance below your risk-
| assessed value, your incentive is to meet their price and try to
| make it up in other markets or through better investments. This
| tendency would get worse in times of strong investment growth.
|
| Thus the investment-dependent insurance industry loses when
| investments fail, and also tends to lose after investments have
| been winning. Insurance profitability in the last two decades may
| reflect a sweet spot of stock market performance more than
| improvements in risk-assessment.
|
| Assuming over-exposure, then what? Both low prices and
| availability depend on diverse and competitive suppliers. After
| an insurer has suffered major losses in a market, particularly to
| the point of viability, they lose the confidence of both
| investors and customers -- and insurance depends entirely on that
| belief of reliability. So their best response is to simply leave
| that market, to maintain their reputation in other markets. Then
| as more insurers leave a market, prices go up, consuming all
| available price elasticity - which is very, very significant for
| homes as fixed assets that are key to other value streams like
| jobs, schools, etc.
|
| Still, that seems limited to housing unless it takes down cross-
| subsidizing insurance companies.
|
| But it does end housing in these markets. Individuals won't be
| able to buy homes because of the cost of mortgages and insurance.
| But if insurance is unavailable large companies could own
| apartments (or even subdivisions where they lease homes) and
| self-insure or enjoy more tailored insurance.
|
| With entire neighborhoods destroyed by fire, developers could
| rebuild newer, denser housing. And insurers could stay in
| business by settling with policy holders using money combined
| with a stake in the new neighborhood corporation.
|
| That's the ideal solution, but it won't happen at neighborhood
| scale because it would involve too many coordination costs. The
| state (California) would have to effectively take all the
| property to avoid hold-outs, and then arrange with various
| insurance companies and developers.
|
| So the economic solution is for developers to buy up plots of
| burned-down neighborhoods. A single small developer could use
| California's SB-9 to build 4 units where there was one. And
| larger developers could buy a 4 adjacent plots and build a
| 30-unit apartment. Both could self-insure, or be well-served by
| insurance company that focuses on protectable, high-density
| housing.
|
| Doing that at middling scale - lots of complex transactions -
| would make a good business, albeit not the typical YC. You'd
| combine a small tech firm with a boutique law firm, add a
| government relations team. You'd have to be up and running
| quickly to use the crisis to get the policies you need and start
| coordinating developers who are sure to be in demand.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I often hear people bring up the point that wood buildings are a
| risk for wildfires and brick/concrete would be safer. When I did
| some research on this topic years ago I concluded that
| brick/concrete is much less stable in an Earthquake, which is
| also a concern for LA. Is it possible to build earthquake
| resistant concrete structures?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Yes, you can build reinforced concrete structures rated to not
| collapse during a M8-9 earthquake. However, the quantity of
| steel and reinforcement required for the concrete structure to
| have sufficient strength makes it expensive and labor intensive
| to build.
|
| The US has been pioneering other construction techniques using
| welded steel plates instead of reinforced concrete. They have
| excellent seismic resistance and are much cheaper to build
| because you don't need to place rebar.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| > That neither is a solution to the actual problem is glossed
| over, because as a society, we've become accustomed to the idea
| that there is a political solution to all problems.
|
| THIS. I have started thinking a lot about this recently, and this
| isn't a lot less obvious that it sounds at first. We tend to
| think that, if we find _some_ consensus to fix a problem, this
| will be fixed. But many problems emerge now that no consensus, no
| matter how global, will not fix.
|
| And even that very idea that we are a reasonable species and we
| will converge to some consensus-based solution isn't actually
| true.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| The answer is, of course, no. (Betteridge's law and all that)
|
| Are there going to be massive changes in building codes? Yes.
| Will that make owning a building more expensive? Yes. Will the
| pundits tell you it is the fault of the what ever political party
| is in power? of course they will.
|
| What is true is that 'pre-global warming' designed infrastructure
| is going to become uninsurable because it will be regularly
| destroyed. Once a track record is established for 'global warming
| aware' infrastructure, the cost to insure it will become more
| clear.
|
| If you were wondering "How will global climate change effect me
| personally?", this is it. Your city's costs are going up as it
| has to rebuild itself to a new standard, if you own a home your
| insurance costs are going up until you tear it down (or it gets
| destroyed) and rebuild it to the new standard.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Everything is insurable - for the right price. But if you aren't
| allowed to pay that price then I guess that's a problem.
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