Home Loss File System
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
Were continuing to work to get the word out about this and the physical file boxes were creating for folks who are not tech savvy (homelossfilesystem.com).
We've disseminated 2700 of the physical file boxes to fire survivors over the last 15 years and excited about what the digital resource can become.
We welcome contributors/volunteers/suggestions/feedback - feel free to add them here or email us homelossfilesystem@gmail.com
The GoFundMe is 65% the way to its goal. If you wish you contribute you can here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-deliver-mor-1500-home-los...
Thanks again all! Please continue to share with any fire survivors!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TPeJzW5pa-BiJZjuEa1y...
(Also hi from just a little bit up the 15 if you’re still in scripps ranch :))
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TPeJzW5pa-BiJZjuEa1y...
I didn't know /htmlview was a feature of Google Sheets. neat
I've always considered insurance false-economy and avoided it wherever possible, especially for events with losses <$20k. This is because the value of the three time-costs of insurance (time to find, time to monitor, and time to claim) generally exceed the expected value the claim.
For example, if my flight were cancelled, I might lose $1000. But all the hassle signing up for, monitoring (to ensure conditions don't change significantly in the insurer's favour; often conveyed by an email to a spam folder), and going through a stereotypically labyrinthine claims process is significantly worse than being out of pocket $1000. Or another way to put it, I'd pay $1000 just to avoid having to do all that. Or a third way to put it, if someone offered me $1000 to find them a suitable insurance policy, monitor it to make sure the company didn't spontaneously alter it, and make a claim on their behalf, I wouldn't do it, it's just not worth it.
I get why insurers are like this. If they can sneak you a letter/email(/fax) and on in a foot note on page 43 'notify' you of a reduction in your coverage (for unchanged premiums), they make money. And if they make lodging a claim as onerous as possible, some % of claimants will abandon the claim, making them even more money. So insurance companies are just doing what they're legally allowed to do to make as much money as possible.
Where possible (e.g. for events without enormous payouts [obviously not so helpful in the case of LA fires]) it can be better to DIY insurance, i.e. put a little savings aside for those events (just as one may pay insurance premiums), that way, you actually have it when you need it, unlike insurance payouts from insurers who generally try to make it as difficult as possible to obtain.
Everything is relative, right? Self insurance is fine if you can afford it. Most people can't wear a $20k hit without potentially ending up homeless or in significant financial distress.
There has been a flurry of services in the EU that handle these things for you, if you are impacted. It's usually as simple as 1 form + a pic of a boarding pass, wait ~3 months and get ~70% of the money into your account. Exactly as low effort as needed to make it both useful and (one would hope) incentivise the airlines to sort it out in a better way for the client (i.e. rebooking, vouchers, etc).
For instance, our home flooded to the roofline and our car was washed away to god knows where five years back. Home insurance covers floods - but not floods caused by rivers. Car insurance covers floods - but only if parked on public land, and again excludes rivers.
Two years ago we had a wildfire. Luckily, the houses did not burn, but all of our infrastructure - tanks, solar panels, electrical wiring, etc. - and our truck, did.
Again, our home insurer informed us that they could only provide coverage in the event of total loss. Damage or partial loss, not our problem. The truck insurer informed us that the policy only covers fires which originate within the vehicle.
It’s a grift. Every probable event is excluded in one way or another, and only highly unlikely sets of circumstances remain, like your vehicle spontaneously combusting on a rainy day, or your stone home burning down to the foundations.
Basically, it takes just as much time for your investments to go from 10,000 USD to 50,000 USD as it does for 50,000 USD to go to 250,000 USD. So a setback of 5,000 USD has a disproportionate impact on your future financials the less money you start off with.
In other words, if your total wealth is low enough, the premiums can set you back much less than the expected loss from the insured event, and at the same time make insurance companies a profit.
I'm still learning about this stuff, but here's an article that breaks it down in more detail and more clearly than I have: https://entropicthoughts.com/when-is-insurance-worth-it
Said article has apparently popped up on HN a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26834333
For example, if my car breaks down in the middle of nowhere at 3am, I expect I'll end up paying far more for recovery were I self-insured than a breakdown insurer will.
I think the article you linked is flawed because it presents a mathematical solution without taking this into account.
Also, I'd like to take a moment to appreciate how close this comes to implementing most of a website within a google spreadsheet. I know that much of this is intended to be duplicated and filled out, but the first few tabs would be right at home as HTML somewhere. You can't beat the hosting cost of doing it this way, and now I wonder how many folks are abusing Google Docs like that.
It looks horrible from any usability and GUI perspective.
Now we have quantum storage.
Land Value Deduction – In the event of a total loss to your property, the amount owed to you by the insurer is the cost to rebuild your home at its original location, including building code upgrade coverage and extended replacement cost coverage. Your insurer is not allowed to take a deduction for the value of land under the replacement home you purchase. [Cal Ins. Code 2051.5 (c)(2)]
Then, also essential (if not already there) , is adding or mentioning a way to retrieve /store /note down all credentials for websites, bank apps, ID card, ID/auth/esign apps... For example encouraging the use of a Keepass file, even if new, just to note down all remembered credentials.
One thing I was reading about was some folks cautioning about the scams and underhanded behavior that spring up around unfortunate events.
A tab/page dedicated documenting things to watch out for would be helpful.
Some items like what is described here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-do-i-avoid-scam...
I'm not 100% a fan of the google doc format, but whatever.
Nit-picking it now wouldn't add any value.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TPeJzW5pa-BiJZjuEa1y...
Shall we have a meta discussion?
"I’ve already started spreading the word about the spreadsheet, it’s a great resource."
I understand the people/person behind this wants to quickly and easily impart information, so the best format for the job is whichever one they can distribute info in as quickly as possible -- but I also see this as a sort of indictment of the World Wide Web as we know it.
This should be a website. This should be at the top of search results. This should be viewable on mobile devices and desktops. And yet, it's being shared through a proprietary office suite service in the form of a spreadsheet that can't be quickly referenced or copied without loading an entire webapp.
If you're one of the many people who wonder why Google stopped being useful, if you're one of the many people who think it's getting harder to find stuff online, here's your answer as to why. All the good, salient, pertinent, well-formed information that you want to find, is being shared like this.
This is what's easiest for people, and that's at odds with how we find content these days. This comment came out kind of half-baked, but I think it's interesting to think about, and it's not a viewpoint I see here often.
I believe that developers could bridge this gap easily, if they weren’t in the denial about their own UI/UX issues themselves.
In either case, justifying unwillingness to learn is a race to the bottom. I don't want every app to be made targeted at the lowest common denominator -- nor do I think it is healthy for society -- in terms of digital literacy. That's a race to the bottom to every app being like Tiktok.
Remember, that Gen Z doesn't understand what a directory or a file is because they grew up on spoon-feeding mobile apps, and this is causing problems for them when they enter the workplace.
This type of thought process of making everything as streamlined as possible is why that happens.
There’s a difference between learning google sheets and learning markdown.
And you are misinterpreting the desire to not deal with irrelevant complexity as some race to the bottom, as if it wasn’t constrained by the task itself.
The task of both wiki and google suite (in this case) is to create web documents with formatting and links. We clearly see what wins when there’s no additional constraints that wikipedia as a project imposes. Tiktok is completely incomparable to these and is not the “minimum state” of the same task.
This type of thought process of making everything as streamlined as possible is why that happens.
This is just an incomplete thought. Multiple factors at play here and only one of these is a type of thought process. This is as unreasonable as saying “attention to details is bad cause it’s a type of thought process that allows burglars to enter homes”.
>No website offers that kind of ease of use for _adding_ information
Obviously Wikipedia isn't great to upload your social security number to, but it does allow democratic adding of information which I cited it as an example of.
Please read the HN guidelines. You seem to require a refresher:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Don't be snarky.
Wikipedia is nothing like what this is for adding information in the way the comment says. Particularly because one of the very key points about this sheet is that you can copy it and add information. It's explicitly for that and Wikipedia absolutely does not offer the ease of use of filling in forms and adding your information on the go.
I run an information website for a living. There is nothing I could have done that would have beat the speed and flexibility of that response. My own response was just to give those resources more visibility.
My takeaway was somewhat opposite to yours: it's marvelous that we can do so much, so fast, for free, with minimal computer skills. We should aim to make the independent web this easy.
Ultimately, I think, the distinction between "products" and ad-hoc effort is that one is tolerant of abuse and bad actors (the "enterprise" or bureaucratic system) and the other simply isn't.
I think I read it somewhere here, that any large project eventually turns into a moderation system.
I'm not sure what actions to take as a result of this observation... except perhaps to be a little bit sad.
Actually, I'd argue that our takeaway is the same. That's exactly the wider point I'm making, I'm just using this emergency as a synecdoche for it. This is good, the independent web would be better. Why is the barrier for entry to the 'normal' web so high that these people didn't consider it?
Lots of information that should be hosted by local, independent groups is being hosted in these closed un-indexable platforms. It does the creator a disservice and the end-user a disservice.
Had this disaster happened 10-15 years ago, I wager that this information would (I think) likely be displayed and posted here as a website (or at least turned into one).
And zooming out, how much good info is tied up in Google Docs alone? Indulge me.
- Here's TaranVH's (The editor from Linus Tech Tips, and a very technically skilled, impressive person) guide to colour grading.[This one hurts particularly because it's such a good document and desperately wants to be anything but a Google Doc.](https://shorturl.at/InI89)
- Here's a great resource for buying products for [Curly Hair.](https://shorturl.at/ZbNF9) This should be a blog.
- How many times have you seen YT drama or open letters be Google Docs? (https://shorturl.at/fJapj) If they were here, it'd be <motherfuckingwebsite.com>
- Here's a guide to video game stats. This should be on a Wiki. (https://shorturl.at/db49s)
- Here's a worldbuilding calculator. This should be a tool website.* (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AML0mIQcWDrrEHj-InXo...)
Whatever your opinion on whether or not these should or should not be documents vs. webpages, can we at least agree that they have information that people would be interested in? This stuff makes up the internet, this is where all the cool shit is. 10-15 years ago, these would be in search results. They're not anymore. It's all here, in undiscoverable Google Docs, unsearchable Discord servers, slow meandering Reddit threads, locked-down Facebook Groups and anti-discoverable TikTok feeds.
I keep hearing too much about good content leaving us (AI Slop in search), and not nearly enough about where it's going. If you find out where the good, creative stuff is going, you'll get your good, creative internet back.
*: I've said 'should' a lot, when what I mean is 'it would have been one when I was a kid'.
the average person would not be able to make something even close to this sheet. where are they going to host it? do they have a domain? certs? do they even know how to write html? css? during a spiky event such as a wildfire, will their website even stay up?
Wouldn't this be a near perfect use-case for AI generated websites?
A non-tech user prompting ChatGPT to write out HTML+CSS+Javascript still doesn't cover the other logistical challenges of hosting it on a server somewhere. E.g. Buy a domain? Then buy web hosting package? Or use Netlify? Amazon S3?
Maybe someday OpenAI will have AI agents with authority to pay with customers' credit-cards and opens Cloudflare or DigitalOcean accounts on the users' behalf. That's a long time into the future where such a workflow would be trusted by non-technical end users. And then you still have the irony of using another proprietary entity of AI to empower users to put up web pages.
Whether the internet was 1990s Geocities or something like Github Pages today, a user sharing content on a personal webpage is not a trivial task. So non-techies compensate with commercial services such as MySpace pages, Twitter tweets, Facebook pages, or examples like this thread's Google Docs spreadsheet. A common theme of all those commercial services is: they handled the complexities of web hosting.
EDIT reply: >I feel like this response contains within it a great deal of contempt for average people
No, you misinterpreted. I was trying to get techies to empathize with typical end users and understand the reasons why they don't host their own web pages. If that empathy was fully internalized, we'd already predict that a ChatGPT-CoPilot assisted HTML tool isn't the only issue. The gp you replied to highlighted that in his first paragraph.
I have true admiration and not contempt for the end users at this charity using Google Spreadsheets to empower themselves to share a doc without waiting for a "real programmer or webmaster" to do it for them.
>Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere,
What's the current best answer for "website for free somewhere" that doesn't have the same criticism of being a proprietary entity that this subthread's gp was lamenting?
Could you not just ask an LLM how one could host this website for free somewhere, and do the same for any logistical challenges that arise beyond that?
I don't think it's a value judgement to say one thing is easier than another and hence people will. Choose the easier thing.
If we want more folks to use and build websites, it needs to be Google-Docs level easy, otherwise people will use Google Docs.
I wish this was made obvious to users, but FYI: you can change /edit to /preview at the end of the URL to get something more like a webpage.
There are a lot of sheets on this worksheet that are intended to be edited. Sometimes we forget that spreadsheets are popular because they are useful for the people who use them. They have an incredibly low barrier of adoption, are intuitive and pratical for editing, and frankly, for the average users, they do tables far better than HTML.
Why the fucking web has to be the measure of all things and everything needs to be hypertext? Why the web has to be everything and absorb all other applications?
There must be a reason why Visical was the killer app that really popularized the home computer for non-nerds, followed by 1-2-3 and why almost 40 years laters excel is still one of the most used tools.
Yeah, not everybody in the world is a developer, not everybody has to think like us, and frankly, sometimes we are pretty limited in our way of thinking, and way less creative than our users.
In 2015 refugee crisis, website had much better organization. It had nice graphic and translation to 5 languages. It had upto date information about police locations, border weaknesses, and how to use free trains (avoid ticket checks). Volunteers were even giving away free phones with SIM data plans, bolt cutters, single use tents...
At the time of writing this, the linked-to Google Sheet redirects to an html-only view with this message: "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file." In this html-only view, while the user can still see the entire list of sheets at the top, in-document links to other sheets do not work, and some text overflows its cell and is not visible.
Most important information appears to be visible still, but those who wish to add to or edit the document seem to be out of luck.
What went wrong? Perhaps each Google Sheet has access throttling, not ideal for users of high-traffic docs like this, especially if the users have critical information to share.
And yet, what other tool should they have used?
We need collaborative, easily-shareable, WYSIWYG document editors for situations just like this, except of course, their access should not be throttled, and their content should be discoverable by search engines.
Do we need a new web? A web whose content is able to be directly manipulated? A web that is collaborative by default?
A bunch of rich home owners have their houses burned down it's an emergency.
Tens of thousands of homeless people live on the streets and nobody bats an eye.
Just saying.
"We've disseminated 2700 of the physical file boxes to fire survivors over the last 15 years and excited about what the digital resource can become."