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Comment by smogcutter | Hacker News Reader

I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.

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People that don't buy insurance because they think it's a scam, then end up impoverished after a foreseeable accident or theft, as a more common one.

Foreseeable accident?

Not buying flood insurance while living in a flood plain is an example I've seen in my city

How many renters have a useful amount of renter's insurance?

Probably a lot? I've moved around a bunch over the past 20 years, so have had several landlords. I think all of them for the past decade have required proof of insurance when signing the lease. I don't think anyone I rented from required it before 2018ish

Echoing a sibling comment, lots of landlords require it now, and the basic packages that insurers offer you as a bundle with auto or other forms of insurance are pretty decent, depending on state.

Typically seems like $100-200 per year for coverage that would handle the loss of most of one's possessions, provided you don't get screwed by "well, you don't have the receipt" or "we only cover water ingress, not floods or leaks".

What do you consider useful? While I do not know how easy it is to make a claim, but my policy is a bit over $100 annual and covers some $20-30k loss. Which feels more than sufficient.

Hopefully, I never have to use it, and it is just a tax I pay.

To add on to this, if you are in a "special flood zone", traditional renters insurance does not cover floods.

I'm talking about people buying houses near a river that floods regularly and not purchasing flood insurance. Someone else brought up renter's insurance in response to my comment about flood insurance. Renter's insurance is cheap, btw. I have something like $300k coverage for less than $10/month bundled with my car insurance.

I thought you can't even get that if you are in an area that is often flooded.

The flood-risk zones requiring flood insurance are insufficient to rely solely upon being forced to get insurance. Some floods extend past those zones or hit areas not covered by them.

I don't [think] there is some threshold of extreme skepticism at which someone suddenly reverses polarity under skeptical duress and flips over into a mark. Rather, you just have a mark trying to be good at skepticism and failing horribly.

Sovereign citizenry is such a strange thing to me. It’s all the parts of a conspiracy theory with none of the interesting things like aliens or lizard people. No those are replaced with strange interpretations of laws and ordinances.

It's not strange really, it's tax evasion with an addition of larping to not feel bad. Oppressive government is in fact out there, but you feel that you can neither challenge nor escape it, so it's just that -- sublimation of sorts

I think this makes sense as part of the existing 'skeptic cost'

What exactly is hyper-skeptical about them?

Hyper-skepticism is quite selective, driven by ideology and partisanship. Some of the most successful grifters become the heads of political parties, governments, etc.

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