The insurance industry believes in climate change no matter what the MAGA says to their cult.
— American Patrick (@americapatrick100.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 12:26 PM
These BlueSky posts are about State Farm pulling out from parts of the Southern California property insurance market over the summer.
I am betting State Farm’s actuaries and risk management teams looked at their numbers and basically said that no matter the premium level charged, losses would be greater than premiums and overhead in these areas do to increased wildfire risk so the best option for the company was to get the hell out of the region with substantial notice to their former policy holders.
That is just my bet.
Actuaries rule the world over a long enough time horizon and as the world’s climate changes due to very predictable mechanisms, actuaries will be making very unpopular decisions as they attempt to balance future premiums to future obligations. Their choices are to cover less, charge more or run like hell.
Baud
You may not believe in math, but math believes in you.
Steve LaBonne
As with the Will Stancil piece reproduced in an earlier thread, reality always will win out, eventually, over social media- fueled mass delusion. The only question is how much death and destruction will occur on the way there.
Melancholy Jaques
If the reports I read at the time were true, it was the insurance companies that convinced the auto industry to stop their relentless campaigns against any and all safety measures.
VFX Lurker
Martin made a similar point in the comments for the previous post.
Scout211
My daughter and SIL live in Placer County and that is only one of the counties in California that are almost uninsurable. They are on their third insurance company and from 2023 to 2024 their homeowner’s insurance doubled. They now pay $1,000 a month for homeowners insurance with a high deductible. The other option is the state program that is not great and also expensive. Their broker suggested they could increase their deductibe to $40,000 to decrease the premiums but the numbers really don’t add up when it only decreases the premiums by a small amount.
This will be the future of California, like the future of Florida and the other hurricane-prone states. We will all be paying more, thousands more per year in the years to come.
Gin & Tonic
A combination of Prop 103 and an overly-controlling state Insurance Department prevented them from charging what they considered an appropriate premium level.
PsiFighter37
Entirely justifiable, unfortunately. Also ironic that the absent rain that California got the past 2 winters has provided even more fuel for the next dry winter. Pretty bad stuff.
Harrison Wesley
Although Prince Puddinghands of the White Boots has stricken the words ‘ climate change’ from official Florida documents, insurers sre leaving. I don’t think there are more than a couple {if any) places to get homeowners insurance.
Old Man Shadow
I honestly don’t blame State Farm or any other insurer who looks at certain zip codes and says, “we can no longer fulfill our obligations to our customers, so we will no longer sell our product to them” provided they give advance notice.
It’s not the same as health insurers who fuck you over after taking your money.
There are certain areas of California that should not have been developed. Only so much space for McManisions available before you hit bad fire zones or landslide areas or flood areas.
We need to help everyone who’s affected by this fire, but we need to rebuild smarter.
Gin & Tonic
@Scout211:
Not singling out your daughter, but looking at, say, Pacific Palisades, a $5M house in an area of substantial wildfire risk is a pretty bad bet for a property insurance company.
And not that the “state program” is a program mandated by the state, which is required to be administered and funded by the private sector, i.e. those property-insurance companies doing business in the state. So the losses may be spread over a wider base, but they are still borne by the companies, who, over the longer term, may decide it’s not worth doing business in a particular state at all. (NB, I worked most of my career in an adjacent industry.)
Ryan
i think the signatory has to sign off on the cancellation, given he or she is the signatory. So this should all be illegal.
Scout211
California did pass a law for homeowner’s insurance companies that went into effect this year. It’s a start, with some positives and some negatives for homeowners.
Estimates are that it will increase homeowner’s insurance rates by at least 40% in fire prone areas. And really, how much of California is not fire prone..
scav
As houses become increasingly unaffordable, it somehow seems logical that insurance would soon follow. Even without increasing risk.
Ryan
Well. let me ask the honest question. Is it a good idea to be building in fire-prone areas?
Gin & Tonic
@Ryan: Please don’t spread misinformation. State Farm (no insurer, actually) cancelled policies, they notified their customers that they were non-renewing, which is their right. Policies are typically written for a year, and renewed more or less automatically. But the insurer is not legally required to renew, providing they give the policyholder adequate notice. Knowing State Farm, I am certain they complied with every state regulation.
ETA: Boy, that second sentence is awkward. State Farm did not *cancel* policies; no insurer did. They can’t, absent some kind of fraud.
Another Scott
Reuters story, now, on California property insurance:
I wouldn’t necessarily take those numbers at face value, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were accurate either. State regulation can be pathological; it can also consider things that aren’t necessarily in a news story.
I remember when we bought our place, one of the insurance company questions was how close the nearest fire hydrant is (it’s just across the street). Maybe Pacific Palisades has more hydrants than Glencoe?? (Probably not though.)
Anyway, one has to be careful about averages and comparisons – people who do this stuff for a living aren’t stupid and it’s their job to consider things that casual readers can’t instantly consider. But big variations should be understood by the public and policy-makers, especially when they result in people having unaffordable coverage – or none at all.
Best wishes,
Scott.
scav
@Ryan: Repeat also for areas prone to flood, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, coastal flooding with future sea level rises, etc and there’s damn little space to build on. Some of the foothill stuff is moving into wildland fire risk, but it’s not exactly that fire can’t rip through a purely urban area given those winds.
tam1MI
OT, but I am so disgusted right now at the Feckless Dem Caucus I am ready to spit. The first members of the Dem coalition have gone under the bus.
But I am sure this act of coalition-sacrificing bipartisanship earned them high praise and commendations from those across the aisle OH WAIT.
KatKapCC
@Ryan: Point me to the parts of California that are not “fire prone”.
sab
@Gin & Tonic: When Prop 103 first passed in 1988, State Farm was one of the few insurance companies that didn’t bail out of California in protest. I have been grateful to them ever since. Shows how bad rhe situation is now.
ETA My insurance back then was auto and renters.
Martin
It’s not just that zip codes are uninsurable. It’s impossible to change our behavior to adapt to the circumstances until there’s nothing left but the embers of what needed to change.
And I say this as someone who has yet to do the steps that my insurer has recommended we do, and we’re usually the first on the block to do that kind of stuff. I don’t know a single house in my community that has done them. The city sure as shit hasn’t, based on the fucking massive and perpetually dry pine trees adjacent to my house.
We could take the steps to harden these properties, but we just don’t. I don’t want to cut these trees down, but I need to. Fires like this are a bit like kepler syndrome – if you can harden all of the homes, then the fire doesn’t get purchase and can’t build to this scale. There’s a magic threshold that we can only speculate on, and if you’re below it, your city shrugs off the fire and you never know what you prevented, and if you’re above it, you get this. It’s a bistable system – it’s stable on the safe side if you remain on the safe side and it’s stable on the unsafe side (because everything burns down). But you either need a lot of voluntary compliance for the sake of the community, or you need the force of law and violence to force people to do it. And we lack both.
Baud
NYT on Blue sky, but the blurb says it all.
I hope they go with scurvy.
Gin & Tonic
@sab:
Keep in mind also that State Farm is organized as what is called a “mutual” insurance company, as contrasted with, say, Travelers or Aetna. Companies like the latter are owned by the stockholders, who expect to make a profit from their investment. State Farm and some others like it are (technically) owned by their policyholders, and any excess of premiums and investments over losses and expenses is returned in some form to the policyholders, either as dividends or as reduced premiums. This is not a common form of corporate organization in other industries.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Earlier today I bought a bag of limes from Mexico, so I don’t think that’ll fly.
KatKapCC
@Baud: Yellow fever. Who cares that neither country has had a case of it in over a century!
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Gin & Tonic @Baud ARRRRR.
[Somewhat back on topic] Given the Tesla study mistermix posted I wonder whether Tesla owners will face increased premiums
On a lighter note I give you
Insurance , the White Man’s Burden
Trollhattan
Premiums have tripled and quadrupled in a lot of the Sierra foothills in our region, and it’s having an effect. What seems common though, is sale prices softening and nowhere is actually depopulating. We’ll know more in a few years.
(Spouse’s cousin is paying $1200 in Eldorado County. Per month.)
LeftCoastYankee
IIRC the inability to get private (non-government subsidized) insurance is why new nuclear power plants are non-starters.
Given human nature, this is probably a very good thing.
Trollhattan
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Lunch with my coworkers yesterday an extensive Tesla convo broke out, as half of them own one. Turns out they all buy their insurance from Tesla.
oldgold
I own a sandy shack in Ponce de Leon’s peculiar peninsula along the Gulf of Mexico. Can’t buy insurance. Can’t say I blame the actuaries. They are just doing their job.
Trollhattan
@Baud: Republican prion disease is a disease.
Jeffg166
All I know is my home owners insurance goes up every year.
TBone
At the very start of the 2008 debacle, I had a dinner party and we called the AIG customer service department using speakerphone. They were using voicemail and I wish I could hear that tape now – we were, shall we say, very rowdy with many spirited epithets.
https://www.propublica.org/article/article-aigs-downward-spiral-1114
Elizabelle
@LeftCoastYankee: D’oh!
oklahomo
State Farm paid for a roof replacement after a wind storm tore half my roof off here in Oklahoma in fall of 2012. A week after that, I got a cancellation notice: they were pulling out of my area.
VFX Lurker
If they’re going to just make stuff up, they should use fictional diseases. I’m rooting for Captain Trips or the Red Death.
TBone
I read today that California buildings made of concrete melted in the firestorm.
Elizabelle
Pacific Palisades was so beautiful and expensive and closely built. Beautifully manicured.
Shame that it is gone, but I cannot anyone allowing a rebuild with anywhere near that number of homes. The city/county or insurers. And perhaps that is no longer even affordable.
You just cannot protect against those winds, and there is so much fire fuel in the canyons and on the hillsides.
I really feel for some of those who lost their homes and realize that they can’t ever have their dream home again. Not if you wanted it on highlands over the Pacific.
TBone
@Trollhattan: what could go wrong?
Elizabelle
California gets 11 more days of a sane POTUS and administration that wants to help them. And can do so competently. (Of course, some of what is broken cannot be fixed.)
After that, they are on their own.
Baud
jonas
@Ryan:
Well, a lot of development happened in the 50s-80s before climate change started changing the risk equation. Pacific Palisades, iirc, was mostly built up starting in the 60s.
BellyCat
At some point (20-50 years from now?) I predict revolt by those not living in flood/hurricane/fire/Godzilla zones, tired of paying to (temporarily) “save” those living in areas repeatedly destroyed by any of the above.
Should be fun. /s
Old Man Shadow
@BellyCat: Well, they won’t like building up and increased population density either. Or climate refugees showing up.
Miki
Gawd, I hope not. Which isn’t to say I don’t applaud their reality-based contributions. I had one on speed dial when I practiced law.
But have you ever slept with one? Jeebus. “If it don’t calculate, I can’t intimate.”
/s, sort of
Elizabelle
C-Span link to President Biden meeting and remarks on wildfires today; VP Harris at his side. 55 minutes.
President Biden Briefs on California Wildfires Response
MomSense
I’ve been saying for decades that only when the big re-insurance companies refuse to underwrite properties because of climate change risk, will anything change.
MomSense
@MomSense:
I’m one of those people who mourns the library at Alexandria. Have any of you ever looked at how many of the world’s great libraries and museums are at or just above sea level?
Harvard’s Library will get some of my dad’s collection when he dies and he received a letter from them talking about how they will deal with this problem.
In addition to the human misery, humanity will lose so much of our heritage.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I find that beri, beri unlikely.
But for some reason, this Firesign Theatre bit is going through my head. Can’t imagine why.
Gin & Tonic
@TBone:
I would take that with a very large grain of salt. There are several high-heat degradation modes for concrete, but “melting” – implying turning the concrete into a liquid – seems very unlikely. Concrete is stone, sand and cement. None of those materials is known to melt at temperatures you can reach outside of a lab.
Gin & Tonic
@lowtechcyclist:
I knew somebody would come up with that one.
dm
@LeftCoastYankee: Yes. Banks balked at financing them, too — especially after Three Mile Island turned billions of dollars into a write-off.
But, as we add an average commercial nuclear reactor’s worth of capacity in the form of solar power every three weeks in the US[1], nuclear doesn’t seem as important as it did a decade ago (this is something that puzzled me about Microsoft’s offer to finance the re-opening of Three Mile Island — expensive, time-consuming, likely to run into regulation, while a gigawatt solar farm can be licensed and constructed in a year.
Now that they’re finding that many forms of agriculture underneath solar panels actually improves, the land area required also isn’t as big a deal as it seemed a decade ago.
[1] PDF The State of the Solar Industry – Department of Energy
[2] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/agrivoltaics-solar-and-agriculture-co-location
lowtechcyclist
@Gin & Tonic:
It was just sitting there waiting for someone like me, how could I refuse?
I was surprised nobody beat me to it. (I’m looking at you, NotMax!)
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: I think community banks and rural electical co-ops have similar structures. I’ve been a Dominion Power customer. Now I’m a Rappahannock Electical Cooperitve member and I’d never go back if I could help it. Same with the community bank I joined ten years ago.
Elizabelle
Listening to MVP Harris speak now, about 9 minutes into the C-Span link.
So disheartening that we do not get her intelligence, compassion, and competence. We get another round of KleptoTrump and the MoneyBros. America, fuck yeah.
MomSense
@dm:
Solar farms are perfect for brown fields. We have had a terrible, ongoing environmental catastrophe with PFAS contamination in Maine. Farmers who can no longer farm or graze on their land received a pittance from the state in damages. Many of them are converting their farmland to solar farms.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gin & Tonic: I just read an article about lithium batteries in our smart meters. I’ve not gone on a fact check hunt, so I’m not sure, but the article said when exposed to fire the lithium batteries get very hot, transfer heat to the copper in house wiring, and contribute to houses burning down.
if true, that would be very bad.
lowtechcyclist
@dm:
Time was I’d have been more than happy to go along with a massive nuclear power construction program if that’s what it took to forestall global warming. Say what you want about Three Mile Island, at least the damage was geographically limited, which won’t be the case for global warming. And at least the RWNJs wouldn’t have opposed nuclear energy, so it would have been politically feasible. (These days, they’d turn on a dime and oppose it if we libruls were for it, but 20 years ago, they weren’t quite so agile.)
But given that, as you point out, solar power development has left nuclear in the dust, there’s really no point in adding more nuclear power anymore.
Math Guy
@Baud: 👍
lowtechcyclist
Well dayum, I could have been an actuary and ruled the world (like everyone wants to ;-) instead of being a math professor and then a government statistician.
suzanne
@Elizabelle:
I will note that we know how to build closely, with increased fire resistance between buildings. The building code mandates fire-rated exteriors and fire walls between buildings if two separate buildings meet. But this is expensive AF. Uncommon in residential construction due to cost.
Mr. Bemused Senior
I must have that ring
Balconesfault
It’s long been a very unpopular take when I talk with friends on the left, but there is a reason to not favor a lot more immigration into the US that’s not racially motivated.
Rather, it’s a question of carrying capacity and quality of life. Huge portions of the US are largely undevelopable when you think of our mountain ranges that we would rather not have converted into tract housing, and deserts that just don’t have the water to support the population.
Then we have the massive fire risks through much of California and as the climate warms the rest of the Pacific northwest. We have Tornado Alley in the middle of the country. We have the southeast US which will continue to need to deal with more and more destructive hurricanes over time. We have the increased flooding in coastal areas and up estuaries that will be coming with sea level rise.
People are going to live somewhere, and by all evidence that preferred American standard of living is not weather resistant Soviet style architecture in large Urban metropolitan areas. We keep adding more and more tens of millions to our population, and every natural disaster is just going to be that much more catastrophic in terms of property and human loss.
KatKapCC
@Balconesfault: By this rationale, one would also have to support something akin to China’s one-child policy. And that’s not a road we want to go down.
Balconesfault
@KatKapCC: China was trying to reduce population. I’m just saying we don’t need to be welcoming continued growth.
KatKapCC
@Balconesfault: But there will still be continued growth from our own people, especially considering people are living longer and longer, and for every child-free person like me, there’s someone cranking out 10 or 12 kids.
And we cannot simply say “Sorry, no room, go away” to everyone, and the decision-making about who gets let in and who doesn’t will absolutely without a doubt be prejudiced and messed up.
glory b
@oldgold: Yeah, but actuaries also got a CEO murdered.
Something I mentioned several times, to much derision, and some uggested actuaries be gunned down in the street too.
Guess how much insurance will cost then?
Steve LaBonne
@Balconesfault: Ecofascists make me hungry for pie.
mrmoshpotato
I see Dump’s racist, Eurotrash, 3rd wife dressed for President Carter’s funeral like she lives in the 1800’s.
Balconesfault
@KatKapCC: currently the US is at 1.787 births per woman.
Sister Golden Bear
OT: They say you should only say something good about someone when they die.
Anita Bryant is dead. Fucking good.
KatKapCC
@Balconesfault: You do realize that’s an average, yes? Which means there are plenty of people having more than that. Also, even if every woman only had two kids, and roughly half those kids are female, and the majority of them grow up to also have two kids, like…you are able to add, yes? And you don’t know if that average birth rate will remain the same, especially since it has actually increased in the last few years. Plus there are the racist nativist white people who want to make as many Nazi babies as possible to crowd out the brown ones.
What’s your ultimate point? You seem to really be dedicated to the notion that one day we’re just gonna have to stop letting all these certain-kinds-of-people into the country because we’re just all out of room.
Steve LaBonne
@Sister Golden Bear: Best news I’ve heard today.
Sister Golden Bear
@Baud: I’m surprised they haven’t settled on the “woke mind virus.”
Which would have the added bonus of justifying herding lots of U.S. citizens into
concentration“quarantine” camps. Can’t be too careful you know…Balconesfault
@mrmoshpotato: @Steve LaBonne: usually I get called that when I comment to someone that they shouldn’t leave their Ford f series truck idling in the parking lot just so they can have the air conditioner running when they get back into it.
Baud
Old Man Shadow
Well, that was fun.
Got an evacuation warning on my phone… ten minutes later came the notice that it was a false alarm.
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: I agree with this. However, a fire can weaken the steel reinforcement – might make it uninhabitable.
Sister Golden Bear
@KatKapCC:
As the Fear song goes…
There’s so many of us
There’s so many of us
There’s so many
There’s so many of us
There’s so many of us
There’s so many [Repeat: x2]
Let’s have a war
So you can go and die!
Let’s have a war!
We could all use the money!
Let’s have a war!
We need the space!
Let’s have a war!
Clean out this place!
KatKapCC
SCOTUS denied Trump’s request to stay his sentencing. 5-4 vote, looks like Barrett and Roberts joined the liberals.
Baud beat me to the punch, as is his wont :)
mrmoshpotato
@oldgold:
@glory b: I don’t blame the actuaries. I doubt they’re responsible for the companies’ boards being such greed assholes.
E.
You guys who think there are not going to be more nuclear power plants built have not been paying attention to AI, Bitcoin, and politics.
The CEO of Tennessee Valley Authority (Jeff Lyash, he makes 10.5 million a year and is the federal government’s highest paid employee) says he wants to build 30 new nuclear plants in the next 15 years. When asked about the incoming administration, all he really did is smile. And then go into a discussion about “innovation in the public policy space” which is code word for getting rid of environmental and safety regulations. These people are both criminally insane and dead serious. And very, very powerful.
catclub
@Balconesfault: I would say that overall population density is lower in the US than most other destination nations for emigrants.
US is far more fertile and inhabitable than China.
Not sure about Russia.
catclub
@Sister Golden Bear: Lebensraum
Baud
Via Reddit
Be forewarned.
KatKapCC
@catclub: Russia is certainly uninhabitable on an emotional, spiritual, mental, and just generally human level.
Steve LaBonne
@KatKapCC: Almost as good news as Anita Bryant croaking.
sixthdoctor
(deleted, dupe of @Baud and @KatKapCC)
mrmoshpotato
@Sister Golden Bear: Joining
Phyllis Schlafly – in Hell.
KatKapCC
I’m sort of confused as to why Trump sought a stay, since it seems exceedingly unlikely Merchan is going to give him anything beyond “You were a naughty boy, don’t do it again” or something.
Captain C
@KatKapCC: Being convicted of 34 felonies and being sentenced for them at all is likely a severe narcissistic injury to him.
glory b
@E.: I won’t repeat the name of this article, but I will note that it was published before the CA conflagration.
Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire”
Grumpy Old Railroader
Not belittling the problem but I also live in (western) Placer County and my insurance has not increased. It is based on zip code rather than county. But your point is valid
Balconesfault
@KatKapCC: “Also, even if every woman only had two kids, and roughly half those kids are female, and the majority of them grow up to also have two kids, like…you are able to add, yes? ”
Ummm … Yes?
JaneE
Years ago, late 80’s early 90’s, the insurance industry in CA started refusing to provide fire insurance for wood shake/shingle roofs. One too many firestorms (like the current ones, but not in brushy areas but the middle of cities) wiped out multiple blocks of apartments or entire tracts of homes. Because back then they put fireplaces in homes with shake roofs, and one ember was enough to start the fire, and with a Santa Ana wind (like now) the fire spread like wildfire. I remember one aerial view of an entire tract, over 100 homes all burnt to ash, with nothing but their prefab fireplaces standing. Off in one corner was an intact home. The only home in the tract whose owners had opted for a tile roof. Building codes changed to require more fire resistance and pretty soon all the new homes had tile roofs. There were other ways to meet the code, but tile was the cheapest.
It still took a while before every insurer refused to cover shakes and shingles, but once it became hard to find them, more and more roofs got asphalt or tile. When we bought here in 92, there were two houses with tile roofs and the rest of the street was shake. There may be one shake left, unless it is the fake shake. Between the building codes and the insurance companies, they changed the way homes were built. The same thing happened in Florida with their hurricane building codes.
Maybe the government will step in and do the equivalent of flood insurance. Or sell special policies like they do for earthquake insurance.
BellyCat
@Old Man Shadow: Truth
Dan B
@Sister Golden Bear: I applaud your kind words.
I doorbelled to stop an anti gay initiative back in the 80’s and Anita had been inspiration for that. Several people looked stunned when they realized this ordinary nice looking guy was probably gay and would suffer if the initiative passed. They probably didn’t think they knew any gay people because LGBT+ people would lose their homes, jobs, etc. so being invisible was protection. So attacking the LA fire chief for being lesbian is chilling to me.
Gvg
@Harrison Wesley: a State Farm agent told me, oh, 30 plus years ago, that the company had made a mistake by becoming the majority insurance company of Florida. At the time he thought they wrote something like 70% or more of Florida’s home owner policies and were driving other insurers out of the market. He thought that was a bad strategy and insurers should always diversify risk and never try to be a monopoly. Later State Farm reversed course, before climate change was big news.
Much later, I was a finance major and took classes on statistics and risk and found out he was right. Kind of interesting that there is a business that has reasons not to be monopolistic. It is a bad thing when a state is losing insurers though.
Ksmiami
@MomSense: I mourn Hypatia as well.
Chetan Murthy
@Balconesfault: @KatKapCC: Oof, I wrote a long comment, and it got eaten (forgot to put in my name/email). Won’t type it all back in. But quite simply, there is no way we can restrict immigration: our economy, the way in which we all get paid, the prices we pay for things, all depend on cheap immigrants, on immigrants who studied overseas before they got here. If you’re serious about “no immigration b/c environment”, then you need to -first- start taxing wealth and the wealthy massively, using that money to subsidize all the low-paid jobs, subsidize education, to the point that native-born will pick that fruit, change those diapers, and study to be doctors and nurses and engineers, in enough numbers that we don’t need to be importing people to do that.
Anybody who doesn’t have a concrete plan for doing those sorts of transfers -first- is just using immigration as a cudgel, and they don’t actually want to solve the problem.
P.S. And the native-born population is dropping, has been for quite a while. So you’ll also have to do what Japan is doing: manage a shrinking economy without the widespread social chaos that that can often cause.
Grumpy Old Railroader
A lot of areas of California are not prone to fires. Death Valley for starters. Also California’s wet North Coast. I live north of Sacramento (going on 70 years) and nope, no out of control firestorms.
Mostly the fire prone areas are foothills and mountains that are drought stricken. And of course the LA Basin gets those Santa Ana winds that reek havoc in their path so the dry hills catch fire which quickly spreads to the adjacent urban area
Chetan Murthy
I’ve only ever lived in dense cities since I left school. What I’ve read in many places, is that too much of what constitutes “the California lifestyle” consists in living at the Wild/Urban Interface, and that is simply not compatible with the reality of fire in the West. Never has been, but the risks were lower (b/c not as densely built-up and global warming wasn’t so pronounced).
mrmoshpotato
@Balconesfault: Trump trash calls you an ecofascist, racist, Eurotrash, 3rd wife?
That’s just weird!
TBone
United Healthcare insurance company phoned in to interrupt breast cancer surgeon during surgery to question her about whether the patient needed inpatient care.
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/01/uhc-pulls-surgeon-out-or-question-cancer
WTAF we need more Luigis.
Kayla Rudbek
This reminded me of this Kipling poem (and yes, Kipling and the poem are problematic). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Headings
Chetan Murthy
I sympathize with you, but what we actually need is more Lina Khans, more Liz Warrens, more Richard Cordrays, more Brooksley Borns, more Gary Genslers.
We can’t rely on vigilante justice to do the job: all that will do is produce more heavy-handed police and private security tactics.
RevRick
@Baud: The use of the verb “believe “ with regards to math or science is a category error of the highest degree. Math or science statements are either true or false. Belief has no meaning.
TBone
@Chetan Murthy: that’s your takeaway from this situation, King Tut? My stupid comment?
Chetan Murthy
@TBone: I -agree- with you that what UHC is doing is unconscionable. But you don’t solve problems like that with random violence: you solve it with -bureaucracy- and -regulation-. We have as a society decided to abandon those tools.
Once I read a very interesting book by Michel Foucault, _Discipline and Punish_, about the invention of modern penology and the bureaucracy of punishment. He made the point that if you really want to reduce some sort of crime, you don’t do so by increasing the punishment (vigilante justice a la Mangione) but rather by increasing the -certainty- of punishment.
I’m just as appalled as you are by the things we see UHC doing, and I wonder why and how they’re allowed to do these things, when supposedly the ACA prevented them. I really do wonder about that.
mrmoshpotato
@TBone: What? Anyway, 🎵FUNKY TUT!🎵
TBone
@Chetan Murthy: well then you can excuse my stupid (unserious) comment made in a fit of pique because this was BREAST CANCER SURGERY and it’s not just UHC it’ll be all of them using the new “authorization” process. Like they’re some kind of gods, holding our lives over a fucking phone connection (better hope there’s good reception on that ONE allowed call, with no interruption of phone service or audibility!).
mrmoshpotato
@RevRick: What about life after love?
TBone
@mrmoshpotato: tut tutting away, tut tutting away…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iUODdPpnxcA
Torrey
@Sister Golden Bear: Apparently Bryant died on December 16. And let it not be said she never did anything good: she has at least given us another reason to feel celebratory on Beethoven’s birthday.
Another reason to play “Ode to Joy” on high volume.
Chetan Murthy
@Torrey: I really like this rendition of Ode to Joy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEarlhvc9dY&t=4s
That it is being played in Hong Kong, and the knowledge of what happened to Hong Kong in the years after, makes it bittersweet.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chetan Murthy: ¿Porque no los dos?
Chetan Murthy
@Sister Golden Bear: As much as I’d like to see these richies pay for their crimes, the simple fact is that vigilante justice will just incite violence in return. You can bet that if this became common, there’d be laws allowing private security to shoot first and face no penalty for mistakes.
mrmoshpotato
@TBone: No. More like 🎵Asses shake and get down tonight, asses shake and wang chung tonight!🎵
mrmoshpotato
@Chetan Murthy:
Most likely. Even more reason for the richest country in human existence to have UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE!
Greed fucker wouldn’t be dead if we had universal healthcare.
p.a.
Late to the party but you know who else takes climate change seriously? The Dept of Defense. When the Rs pull their bullshit dog&pony show Congressional anti-climate science hearings, I wish Dems had the balls to bring in DoD authorities to testify. And no, I’m not sure if that’s possible or what the Rethug civilian leadership can do to stop it.
Chetan Murthy
Yes, this would be an example of a productive response to this situation. I remember before the ACA, we had all sorts of stories about rescission of benefits: you’d paid your policy, you thought it covered your illness, but NoOo, the insurance company trotted out a reason (they can always gin up a reason, they have lawyers enough to wear you down, and you’re dying or bereaved meanwhile) why they could deny your benefits. I thought that the ACA had fixed this but ….. it seems not. It’s a pity that our country has decided to hand power to those who want to go backward, and not forward towards single-payer. Sigh.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
Actually, there are quite a few math statements for which it has been proven that they cannot be proven true or false.
Also, of course, there are numerous conjectures, that is, math statements that have not yet been proven true or false, but the possibility exists of proving one result or the other, as far as we know.
So saying “I believe that Goldbach’s Conjecture will someday be proven true” is a perfectly reasonable thing for a mathematician to say.
MobiusKlein
@Grumpy Old Railroader: The North Coast certainly does have fires – I’ve seen the redwoods with a fire hole burned thru, and the tree still lived.
There are fewer people there, so it’s less likely to be a massive terror, but the fires are still going to happen.
Chetan Murthy
@MobiusKlein: I remember about ten years ago, I read an article about fires on the Olympic Penninsula in WA. The author was writing about these fires in temperate rainforest up there, and how that was supposed to never happen, but it was happening anyway. B/c (ofc) climate change.
Gin & Tonic
@lowtechcyclist:
The Goldbach Conjecture is a lovely example here, and a fascinating case. It’s over 250 years old, it’s simple enough that it can be completely explained to an elementary-school student, yet it is unproven.
For those who may not be aware, it states that every even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers.
mrmoshpotato
@p.a.: Bomb the shit out of the Kremlin’s GOP as enemy com
batantsbitches.Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: Heck, we can go further to give evidence that -belief- matters in science too. I remember 30+ years ago reading a book about the philosophy of science. It talked about the case of “TEA lasers”. For years it had been conjectured that it was possible to build such a thing, but nobody had done it. Then somebody did it, and published a paper with his method. Others tried it, and failed to replicate. [so far, kinda like cold fusion, eh?] He invited people to his lab to replicate there: people came, replicated, went home failed to replicate. [again, kinda like cold fusion.] After a couple more rounds of lab visits, eventually people started being able to replicate independently at their home labs, and boom, everybody agreed that the method worked and it was possible to make TEA lasers.
The next chapter talked about the same sort of social process at work in gravity wave detection. With the passage of the decades, that latter one has come to pass as well.
During the period when people weren’t able to reproduce, it required -belief- that the guy was right, that he had actually made a TEA laser. The difference (I would say) between what happens in science, and what happens in religion, is that science has a -process– for turning barely-if-at-all-justiified belief, into well-justified belief: the scientific method of experiment, publication, and independent replication.
P.S. An even more …. impactful example of belief at work, is about the question “P =? NP”. If it’s true, then all sorts of crypto codes just stop working. But people believe it’s false, and act in the real world on that assumption. But we have no proof either way.
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy:
Uh, they went extinct?
mrmoshpotato
@Gin & Tonic: There was no wanging chung and getting down tonight during that time
ETA – and asses did not shake like holy moly!
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: OooOoops! Ha! I meant “replicate”.
Interstadial
@Chetan Murthy: But these fires are spreading beyond the interface well into the city beyond thanks to the combination of high winds and extremely low humidity.
RevRick
@Melancholy Jaques: Insurance companies forced churches and the Boy Scouts to get their acts together with regard to sexual misconduct.
Fair Economist
Probably a dead thread, but we are switching homeowners insurance in OC and we’re going to be paying – $2000 per year, which is quite affordable. The secret? Our house is in the flats and away from flammable hillsides.
Until the Eaton fire, I don’t recall any brushfire in the LA area ever causing significant damage (dozens of homes or more) outside of obviously vulnerable hillsides and such. Firefighters have been quite amazing. I remember the Holy Fire which resulted in a huge wave of fire sweeping towards Lake Elsinore; I thought it would be a major disaster but the firefighter stopped it in its tracks basically in the first backyards it reached. The Eaton fire was different and took out large swathes of flatland in Altadena (tilted, really, but functionally flat) with dense, gridded development. A horrible first.
Balconesfault
@Fair Economist: yeah it definitely freaked me out to see the amount of destruction in the gridded streets of altadena
elliottg
@TBone: I think it said the surgeon left voluntarily because “she was fed up” and wanted to talk to them (or likely vent).
Chris T.
@KatKapCC:
The part under the surface of Lake Tahoe, the part under the surface of Lake Shasta, …
Not to worry, I’m sure someone will find a way to make the water catch fire soon! 😀