How can we be better documenting the perpetrators involved here for our own Nuremberg trials? Narrative articles are obviously necessary for highlighting the moment, but seem too impermanent to actually prosecute these crimes against humanity.
15,403 karma · joined February 23, 2008
You're right - I really should be paying less due to the unpatched holes in one section of my roof. I obviously need no coverage on this part of the house, as the damage (both already occurred and ongoing) are not covered causes of loss. If you know a way I can express this to my insurance company to receive a discount, without them going "this is weird, we're actually raising your rates", please let me know.
I agree with you that this is terrible. The perverse incentive also underlies the rest of your comment - the insurance company is looking for any reason to cancel your policy. Yesterday it was overgrown vegetation, but who knows what it will be tomorrow.
And while this would appear to be a major impediment to insurance companies accurately pricing risk (ie extra $XX for your trees rather than cancelation), I am not in California and yet still experience the same kind of thing. It really seems like these companies have no idea how to price risk apart from one big cohort of "normal", a few minor deviations (eg woodstoves), and with most everything else being a "we can't write a policy, go elsewhere". Even trying to significantly raise my deductibles to lower premiums nets like $20/year. I'm at the point where I'd drop house insurance completely except for the whole liability coverage thing, which is once again not possible to price out as a separate product in a competitive market (as once again, "different" implies "must be risky" to insurers).
> a change in risk of a few percent
You can't just hand wave adding a few percent on top of that 0.27% to swamp it. The base rate of wildfires themselves must be well below that 0.27% (modulo that perverse incentive). Vegetation obviously adds some risk, but how much? Look at the fire referenced in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49899240 . Notice how it's the lone house standing. Not a patchwork of houses where a good chunk with good vegetation management survived. Rather it was proper vegetation management PLUS a lot of luck.
> that's part of the joy of being a homeowner
This is a common coping refrain but it proves to much for analysis. You could stomach $2k (which isn't all that much in the context of home ownership), but what if it was $50k from a ten item list with some items being much more costly? What if you had bought the house with a five year plan to gradually fix a bunch of similar deferred maintenance, but then were all of a sudden being put over a barrel by the insurer simply looking for pretexts to cancel? Or what if you didn't have that spare $2k, decided to do that work yourself, and their surveillance-based decisions then canceled your policy anyway because tree work "is risky" ?
The point is that every detail of real life ends up looking "risky" when you put it under a microscope - "what if?" and all that. And as I said in my original comment, insurance companies don't really seem interested in accurately pricing risk for conditions outside of the "mainstream" cohort - a cohort which additional surveillance then shrinks.
> Note that this is the same state that won't let auto insurers charge based on "black boxes" either, so good drivers are subsidizing bad drivers (even more than in other places).
This is the same exact "I've got nothing to hide" argument, but with even more invasive telemetry reporting. What you're calling "subsidizing bad drivers" I would call responsible consumer protection to avoid a race to the bottom into yet another pervasive surveillance regime.
We can easily think of types of bad driving that will not show up in telemetry, and types of telemetry that will flag as "bad driving" while being perfectly prudent. And that's not even getting into things like "we see you go out most Friday nights" or "we see you visit liquor stores".
Pricing on crash and moving violation history, as has been the standard for a long while, is good enough. If you feel you're overpaying because rates are constantly going up, the solution certainly isn't to embrace a crab bucket mentality of trying to push it onto some vague "other" people! Rather this is counterproductive - additional discriminators inevitably make rates go up due to increased complexity/stickiness despite any illusion of a temporary reprieve.
Your bushes only seem like a reasonable example because you are looking at them in isolation - it was only a single issue you had to deal with, and something you seemingly wanted to deal with anyway. If they had instead blasted you with a litany of different issues, or a bush that you wanted to keep for sentimental reasons, or you simply didn't have the time/resources to create your own counter-documentation and operate their heavyweight bureaucracy, you'd be singing a much different tune.
And while these things can happen anyway with regular in-person home inspections, the point is that increasing surveillance and unaccountable "AI" make it much easier to bury customers in a deluge of complexity making for even-less-competitive markets.
(I would give a healthy list of examples of my own home being deficient in many ways an insurance inspector would call out yet are in the process of being managed, but I'm sure it would just invite a lot of "well ackshually that's dangerous and weird!" out of touch responses from people whose first instinct is to call someone rather than to fix something themselves)
[0] Notice how they weren't going to raise your premiums by $30 a year or whatever, but outright cancel your policy - in other words a massive overweighting of the actual risk from some bushes growing into the house.
The problem is that it seems isomorphic to modern politics. In one camp you have the builders (of regulatory structure) - in charge through soft social skills (political connections), inherently framing issues in ways that benefit themselves and their circles (regulatory capture). And in the other camp you have the destroyers pushing to prevent and eliminate regulatory structures (their power being pure money), so they can remain unhindered while building their own privately-controlled structures that become de facto inescapable without even a shred of democratic accountability.
Neither one of these camps effectively gives one flying fuck about the things that affect most people, beyond putting on shows pretending to champion those concerns to market themselves. But how the Hell do we break out of this? Any movement that manages to gain traction inevitably seems to be co-opted by opportunists who then arbitrage away any political capital that has built up around the issues, and we take the fast slide back down to the starting place.
Because in addition to simply opposing corpos' name resets, I'll go even further by modifying their names to better label their behavior. Corpos spend gobs of cash on naming and branding - it must mean something. So why not embrace that dynamic from an individualist perspective?
And for what it's worth, I have flagged your comment for the inevitable pointless bickering it has precipitated. While applying reductionist frameworks and seeing where they lead is a necessary part of an individual's path to understanding, please avoid pushing ignorant assertions ("there is no duty here") as if they might constitute well reasoned truths.
There would seem to be a common pattern whereby preaching of values tends to fill in for actually living out those values (eg religion, performative virtue signalling, so-called "rightist" libertarians), and the whole "put our country first!" or "make our country great again!" seem to be strong examples of this.
And physician, heal thyself! It's a bit rich to bemoan "archetypal third world behavior" while applying your own third world sense of order, don't you think?
The real problem is how many people eagerly eat and repeat the nonsensical bullshit, as if they are airtight logical deductions rather than mere rationalizations promulgated by the party's apparatchiks. I don't know if most people still just want to feel power from being on the "winning team" or if they're really unable to mentally model situations with independent parties that have their own rights while government has restrictions in order to preserve those rights, or what. Alas, it does not bode well.
There is a deeper point to my comment - the damage caused by Republicans often circularly benefits them, and isn't so easy to fix. If we have a "blue wave" now, but oil prices stay high as the strategic damage of giving the Strait to Iran can't simply be undone as easily as it was done, then voters need to remember this in a short 2/4/6 years rather than falling for media campaigns attributing the high prices to the future incumbents.
(Note I'm not coming from a partisan perspective here. I personally am a centrist libertarian! I was both-sidesing up to 2020 or so, but at this point it's only responsible to acknowledge that the Republican party has completely jumped the shark. And as much as the government is frustrating - when it's simply eliminated this doesn't make things more free, rather it leaves a power vacuum that often results in things become less free - ie corporate government).
Yes, it does. As far as water is concerned, air conditioners are open loop. Air conditioners make water from condensation forming on the inside (cool) coils. Modern window air conditioners then splash that water on the outside hot coils, to benefit from evaporative cooling. I haven't looked into the details about data center water usage, but I would guess the cited usage is from evaporative cooling.
His first term should have been widely recognized as the abjectly terrible leadership it was (dividership, really), but Covid was one hell of an excuse - and if there is one thing Grump is actually good at, it's making excuses. So instead four years later it was forgotten about because of the price of eggs, or her laugh, or the woke, or Palestine, or who really knows. Let's not make that mistake again!
Bingo. "cheap shade" is doing a lot of work. Typical for this kind of drive by "I've thought about it for 5 minutes but the people who worked on this project must be stupid".
Maybe the division is more apparent if you're using containers, and/or have more of a social group to communicate support levels to? Personally I'm just using NixOS and am still at the stage of "I'm going to reboot the router now, it might take ten minutes or it might take days" [0]
If we don't need this distinction, then perhaps "homebase" could actually make more sense than "homeprod" ? Slightly different connotations, less putting on a show for lots of people but more homey like for a small family?
[0] from a technical perspective I'd love to separate the router out onto its own machine, but I want fast wireguard/openvpn/TOR/etc so it's a VM on a larger machine and I'm not really looking to expand my power consumption footprint to another large machine. I suppose I could split it out to two routers, one with straight NAT+wireguard and one with openvpn/TOR/etc, then the main could run on its own low-power box.
> You should read up on game theory. It doesn't matter what I do
How does this differ from "I might as well drop my trash on the ground in the park, because everyone else is going to do it anyway" ?
You're fallaciously excluding the middle - there will always be some people who drop their trash on the ground. So a clean park must employ groundskeepers to pick it up. But such centralized action can never make up for mass distributed behavior, so it behooves us all to adhere to and propagate good culture that keeps most people from throwing their trash on the ground. And the same dynamic applies to basically every societal construct.
So no, I do not buy your [self-serving] argument that the culture you're simultaneously bemoaning and also engaging in is inevitable.
But we already knew all that! We don't need numbers calculating out infinitesimally small fictitious "tax rates" (for a tax regime that doesn't actually exist) to illustrate it. Unless someone is actively selling the stock they own, they are not paying any income tax on its value, period end of story.
And so rather it feels like a wasted analysis to keep focusing on the value of zero divided by $big_number, when there are going to be far more interesting things like exactly what income did they realize, and what type of expenses did they use to offset it, what amounts did they actually pay tax on, and so on. Because capital gains deferral is not the only way the tax code skews towards the rich by far, yet it's currently using up all the air in the room.
In fact I'd say that angst from this type of person (I consider myself one) is a good chunk vocalizing concerns about "a world without work". "Going your own way" is a large part of the American psyche, so what happens in a world where there is not work that needs to be done, which had been laying out straightforward paths for "your own way" ?
I'm personally not feeling too much of this angst, being both happy working on the kinds of physical things that aren't going to be automated away any time soon, and also having the engineering knowledge/skills to effectively use LLMs and benefit from the automation. But I'm also not looking so far into the future as to worry about those endeavors becoming trite.