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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

(charleshughsmith.substack.com)
478 points spking | 5 comments | 17 Jan 25 00:32 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bluedevil2k ◴[17 Jan 25 01:50 UTC] No.42733208[source]▶
Like we see in California, when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave. Same in Florida. If the free market truly was allowed run normally, the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there. Is that a bad thing? If someone was living in a house near where they tested missiles, we'd call them crazy. At what point can we say the same about people building and rebuilding over and over in these disaster areas.
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EGreg ◴[17 Jan 25 04:23 UTC] No.42734060[source]▶
Can’t you say that about any part of LA? Once a fire gets going, it grows and can destroy any neighborhood.

Call me crazy but if I was the mayor of LA I’d make them invest heavily in PREVENTION. Cameras and drones all over the place in the forests, to nip fires in the bud (and carch arsonists). I would also make sure that the live video footage would be used only for that purpose. It would use AI at the edge to flag every fire immediately and alert nearest authorities, and otherwise delete footage. There may be other AI at the edge uses added later by the regulators but I’d work to put in place heavy bars to overcome (eg 70% in a public referendum) before they are added.

I would also invest heavily in mobile firefighting tools and materials. The firefighters using buckets is pitiful.

But then again, LA hasn’t invested in itself for decades. It’s like the opposite of NYC: rich people don’t want to live in Downtown LA, they live in the equivalent of our Brooklyn, say Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay by the beach.

Because half of downtown looks increasingly more like skid row. Signage and streets are something out of the 70s literally. And there pretty much hasn’t been any new skyscrapers built since the 80s. The skyline is stuck in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie era.

I stayed in Freehand hostel which is actually pretty nice, even though there’s abandoned buildings and homeless all around. I met a drunk Andy Dick there by the pool one evening LOL.

And you people from San Francisco — it ain’t much better over where you are. I visited Twitter HQ right when Elon took over. And let me tell you — there is a curious juxtaposition of City Hall, City Opera, The SF Philharmonic, and the fourth corner of that illustrious intersection is… a large abandoned alleyway with dumpsters. What? Imagine Lincoln Center in NYC having that.

On my show I did a lot of interviews — with regulators, technologists, sociopolitical commentators like Noam Chomsky. But one of my most down-to earth interviews was in SF of a homeless guy w his dog. See it for yourself what I’m talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqjFeaDLuYQ

PS: to the silent downvoters… normally I don’t mind but this time you’re just doing it out of spite. Watch the video or say something. I bet you live there and don’t want to have these things pointed out. SF and LA were so great… so many movements started there. Lately people are fleeing and the homelessness is out of control.

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rafram ◴[17 Jan 25 05:40 UTC] No.42734431[source]▶
> Call me crazy but if I was the mayor of LA I’d make them invest heavily in PREVENTION. Cameras and drones all over the place in the forests, to nip fires in the bud (and carch arsonists).

This is a terrible way to deal with fire. The issue isn’t preventing fires from starting at all, because small fires are all over the place. A dropped cigarette can light a city block on fire if the wind is just right. The issue is preventing spread, and taking precautions when conditions (like wind) are conducive to rapid spread.

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1. EGreg ◴[17 Jan 25 06:15 UTC] No.42734595[source]▶
And those precautions are… putting out the fire before it spreads, right?
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2. dboreham ◴[17 Jan 25 06:33 UTC] No.42734702[source]▶
That's not how these fires work. Wind and dry fuels mean they can't be put out by the time they've been identified and someone has verified they're not some dude burning trash. Drone armies can't carry enough water.
3. rafram ◴[17 Jan 25 14:02 UTC] No.42737582[source]▶
No. Forest fires should be allowed to spread to prevent fuel buildup. It’s bad when they cross into developed areas, though, so you want to prevent that.

If anyone ever implements your drone-based surveillance-state wildland fire suppression system, please let me know so I can avoid hiking in the area.

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4. EGreg ◴[17 Jan 25 15:12 UTC] No.42738329[source]▶
That seems incredibly dangerous. As you said the wind can pick them up and cause an inferno.

If you want to do controlled fires IN ADDITION to the fire suppression system, you can. If fires are the only way to neutralize the fuel, at least control them, and don’t allow any uncontrolled fire to spread and get out of hand. The controlled burns would be planned in advance, done on good days and isolated from spreading too far. Of course those burns would be excluded from the fire suppression system.

But it seems reckless to just “let the fires spread”. You need actual control over fires if you want to have any chance of avoiding disasters.

Imagine you did this in any other area where you're in charge of a system. For example you run a forum and refuse to implement any sort of moderation or spam control. You claim we shouldn't put anything in place to clamp down on it and need to let things run their course naturally, because sometimes risking spam is necessary to get really good updates about stuff by experts. The proper thing to do, then, is to intercept spam from spreading as much as possible but then carve out a whitelist of exceptions. Not to simply not have an anti-spam system at all.

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5. rafram ◴[17 Jan 25 21:14 UTC] No.42743314{3}[source]▶
Well, a lot of people at the Forest Service and other land management agencies used to think like you do. We focused on full suppression throughout the 20th century. Now, when a forest fire does start, it isn't controllable like it used to be. There's too much fuel lying around that we prevented from burning for over a century.

Prescribed burns make sense in certain high-risk areas, but there's no substitute for actual, natural forest fires. We can never artificially cover the same kind of area that a natural fire can cover.

> For example you run a forum and refuse to implement any sort of moderation or spam control. You claim we shouldn't put anything in place to clamp down on it and need to let things run their course naturally, because sometimes risking spam is necessary to get really good updates about stuff by experts.

That analogy has absolutely no bearing on anything we're discussing. Online forums and human behavior aren't a good analogue for forests and forces of nature.