Many of them love consuming and faffing about with complex spreadsheets but I just watched my CTO cut & paste cells with menu items and the mouse, in a round-about A->C, B->A, C->B way. And the font is comic sans, and everything is sorted by color. Any of the more sophisticated tools or a macro is way beyond this one.
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.
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.
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.
That was one (corrupt) option. Another would have been to draw funds by taxing homeowners, specifically, and limiting payouts by fire risk, capping at a mean replacement cost, not per-house. That that's not what happened is an issue with the implementation, not the base concept.
> draw funds by taxing homeowners, specifically, and limiting payouts by fire risk, capping at a mean replacement cost, not per-house
This almost seems designed to maximise fury. You're still taxing low-risk homeowners to pay for high-risk damages. And when a catastrophe hits, you aren't paying enough to rebuild (or avoid bankruptcy, in which case you're just routing taxpayer funds to creditors). Add to that you've branded it a tax increase it's almost something the GOP would run as a false flag against a Democrat.
Also seems very likely to cause a financial crisis that the rest of America will end up paying for anyway. If you don't pay out enough to rebuild that particular lot, then the likely outcome will be an empty lot with a burned out husk on it. In most cases, this is worth considerably less than the remaining value of the mortgage. The homeowner then walks away from the mortgage, leaving the bank holding the bag. The bank has socialized this risk by selling the mortgage as an MBS that is sitting in somebody's money-market account. Cue 2008.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't most of those suffer from serious ongoing humidity problems? I've looked into that style of housing in the past, and it seems like it's always having issues with mold, mildew, and ohter "issues of running 90-100% interior humidity for long periods of time" sort of problems. I think they're okay in drier climates - IIRC they were developed in New Mexico, which is "bone dry nine months of the year, and somewhat drier the other three."
They do - and there are ways to counteract it (the usual problem is similar to damp basements compounded by the lack of air movement and humidity control).
It’s a matter of cost (it’s almost never worth it) and tradeoffs.
But if fire survivability is paramount, it is an option.
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.
The advantage of a metal roof as opposed to most others is the reduction of nooks and crannies where embers can get trapped and light the roof on fire. Metal roofs are also more slick, and dangerous to work on, than any gritty material. A hipped standing seam metal roof with a moderate pitch is going to shed embers pretty handily on both the windward and leeward sides.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure I agree with housing insurance as a public service… we do want to expose some risk to drive behavioral changes. People really shouldn’t be building houses in low lying areas near the shoreline in Florida. But if there’s no risk because it’s covered by other tax payers, then they will.
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.
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.
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.
Margins being slim doesn't mean much as long as insurance companies see continuing operations as profitable. I'd like to see this model stress tested until more insurance companies pull out. This would cause reductions in the housing market from the increased insurance prices and subsequent mortgage reduction, and would lead to more compartmentalized insurance prices and risk approximations between high and low-risk homes.
Either that or a barrage of government policies which will make things worse for everyone and continue the US economy's descent into the death spiral.
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.
Also, when margins are slim, a major event (like a series of wildfires in one of the biggest cities in the US) can wipe out those profits. A responsible insurer can withstand one bad year. But if those major events start happening with more frequency, then one bad year becomes a series of bad years. Reinsurance premiums for the insurer go up, meaning that taking on risk is more expensive, and they’ll eventually have to decide between raising their own premiums to unsustainable levels or pulling out of risky markets.
“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...
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.
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.
There is a specific type of nurse called a CRNA that is basically a replacement for anesthesiologists. And half the nurses I know are going to school for that. It seems like hospitals and insurers want to replace the MD here.
To answer your last question, we would need to have a good idea of what the language sounded like. Linear B was deciphered, we think, by doing frequency analysis but using the Greek language. so it was a script for the Greek language in Crete.
It seems impossible to decipher the script without a sound of the language.
I second this. Do t be scared off by it being for math Olympiads. A lot the first volume deals with concepts across much of the field. Lots of practice and ideas for logs, exponents, word problems.
And it comes with a solution guide which helped me a lot.
As long you have tolerance for it to keep dropping further you’ll be fine. Don’t expect to know where the bottom there is.
People forget the second part of the famous saying. “But when there’s blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.
The reason is that they are highly levered with many small short term trades.
>dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/senate-inquiry-faults-hedge-funds-tax-strategy/https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/senate-inquiry-fault...
“Jul 21, 2014 Within these complicated financial structures, Renaissance Technologies was able to borrow as much as $17 for every $1 in the account.”
Exposure is one reason. Two of my articles have over 3k views. On medium you can make good content and get a decent amount of views much easier than hosting own blog and growth hacking.
It's super easy to get 10k views on an article. My most read article has over 100k views. Probably less than 10% of the views come from Medium itself or Google so there is really no benefit in using Medium. You could use a static host and give your readers a better experience.
It's definitely not hard to get eyes on an article, but you're probably underestimating the amount of views that Medium brings. It has excellent discovery, and based on anecdata from friends who have tried A/B testing this stuff, 90%+ easily come from Medium, especially in the 100,000+ view-range, unless you're intentionally going out of your way to spam the link to your personal site everywhere.
Also, a substantial amount of views come from search engine traffic with almost every bit of content on the internet, unless you're doing it wrong. Your most recent post is full of frequently-searched terms. It seems unlikely that little of it is coming from search engines, and almost impossible that most of that viewership is coming from something other than Medium's discovery.
Maybe try A/B testing with your next article? I think we'd all be interested in that.
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