“Unfortunately, Florida’s insurance market has become challenging in recent years,” the company said in a statement emailed to CBS MoneyWatch. “Last year’s catastrophic hurricane season contributed to an unprecedented rise in reinsurance rates, making it more costly for insurance companies to operate.”
This is hilarious and sould crushingly unsurprising. People actually ended up needing to use the insurance the companies were offering soooo they are just no longer offering it. Proving once again (for the millionth time) insurance companies have absolutely zero desire or feel any moral obligation to actually help people. It is 100% purely a money making operation. The millisecond they actually have to help any of their customers out, they will bend over backwards to get out of it and if they can’t, they’ll just leave entirely and not insure you. Beautiful. God I hate insurance so much.
Insurance doesn’t work very well for things like hurricanes. When big events happen that cause large percentages of their policy holders to file claims at the same time, it results in large payouts which causes increases in price. When prices go up, people don’t insure. This combined with the fact that florida gets hurricanes means prices for insurance are high.
Maybe the state could help by introducing laws to help combat insurance fraud, but that could lead to consumers getting fucked by their insurance companies.
You are being downvoted unfairly. There is greed at play, but there is math and economics as well.
The state could also help by reviewing building codes and infrastructure to make the losses due to hurricanes less severe but, with Florida republican votes not understanding the benefits of government helping address externalities for the benefit of everyone, there’s no chance the situation will improve there…
Most insurance companies strive to avoid excessive profits, honestly and aim for a combined ratio of something less than 5% profit. It’s a fairly competitive field, getting greedy results in losing policies and is very price reactive. Consumers can change pretty easily and do so regularly.
Insurance can work just fine for things like hurricanes. Insurance companies have several methods to address it. They’re all effectively variations of buying insurance policies themselves.
Re-insurance pools are a close analog. It’s basically a bunch of insurance companies from around the planet getting together and agreeing to pool risks. Big companies also use a bunch of funky financial instruments to simulate insurance.
There’s some risk of increased systemic correlation (eg climate change may increase the risk that major hurricanes hit multiple areas around the planet simultaneously). That’s largely mitigated in that we can see it coming. Climate change is pretty prominent in their models and they can adjust premiums or stop offering policies, over time.
The bigger risk is in synthetic systemic risk. It’s burned us a bunch of times already and it’s gonna do it again. Those giant global re-insurance pools are almost certainly fine, and worth the risk, if we just use them for their intended purpose. But history shows that we’ll end up creating derivatives contracts on them and those contracts will get leveraged. Those leveraged pools end up merging and turning into giant financial time bombs.
Are you actually surprised that an insurance company is not there for the good of the people, but to make money? They did keep their contractual obligations and paid out their customers, so you cannot fault them for that.
And what the insurance companies are doing is quite normal behavior. They analyze business risks and move out of fields that are not profitable. They are now telling you that they will no longer cover you so you can find another insurance to take over business. That those other insurance companies are more expensive is just founded in the fact that Florida is already a risky state, and the risks just skyrocket through global warming. And with the water temperatures rising as they do, I expect this year to have an interesting hurricane season.
People complain again that they cannot afford to move to safer places. Maybe now they can start thinking whether they can afford not to move to safer places instead.
Not saying insurance companies are good but I’ve read a lot of the problem is with insurance scams where a roofing company will tell the homeowner they can replace their roof for free with insurance, even if it’s not necessary. Then that company will sue the insurance Co if they don’t pay for it.
Insurance is for protection against a POSSIBLE eventuality. When the event moves from “this might happen” to “this will happen”, insurance is no longer appropriate. I have flood insurance because I live in an area where we don’t have floods. I do live in an area with a fuck ton of snow though. I can’t get insurance for that because I willingly accepted the risk when I bought a house in this geography.
You can’t buy a house you know will get hit by a hurricane and then expect to pay a couple bucks a month so you can get paid $500k later when the hurricane you know would come does come.
Insurance is for accidents. You want insurance to be something it is not.
They are a business and their business model shows they can’t make profit in Florida any longer. It would be morally unjustifiable to continue operating in Florida, to their employees and shareholders.
Reposting my comment from another similar thread ‘cause I think it’s kind of important to add.
Ok, so it doesn’t mention wet bulb temperature anywhere, so I went to figure it out. The first thing I was surprised with is apparently most of online calculators don’t take in values higher than 50C.
I couldn’t find the exact data about humidity for that day, but it has been 35-40%+ at a minimum for most days in that region, sometimes even reaching 90%.
So, 52C at around 40% humidity is 37.5C in wet bulb temp. The point of survivability is around 35, and most humans should be able to withstand 37.5 for several hours, but it’s much worse for sick or elderly. 39 is often a death sentence even for healthy humans after just two hours — your body can no longer lose heat and you bake from the inside. That’s like having an unstoppable runaway fever. And with that humidity it’s reached at 54C.
It’s a bit different depending on your health and all that. But 35 WBT is a definite point for everyone (since our bodies run at 36–37C). Kinda like the difference between “some will die” and “most will die”.
I mean to say that the wet bulb temperature at which most will die is ~31.5°C, the gaurdian report I linked is saying that the 35°C number comes from a 2010 study, whereas the findings of the 2022 study found the number to be much lower ~31.5°C.
It’s probably a measure for persistent temperature then. Like, if you lock someone in a room at that temperature (or if it wouldn’t cool down at night, for example), then that person would be dead no matter what after some amount of hours or days.
35 is more of a real-life guideline, since it does cool down at night and you don’t need to withstand this temperature persistently and indefinitely.
And for the last several years there have been lots of places that exceeded 31.5 WBT during the day. Hell, you can probably find several places with that WBT right now. But since people don’t drop dead immediately and need time to heat up, it’s still survivable.
Think about it in terms of a 2D graph. You need to know the duration in addition to temperature to gauge survivability. A million degrees is survivable for a femtosecond, 35 for an average earth day, and ~31 indefinitely.
From @beigegat’s article it says that from real expieriences it’s 31.5C
The oft-cited 35C value comes from a 2010 theoretical study. However, research co-authored by Kenney this year found that the real threshold our bodies can tolerate could be far lower. “Our data is actual human subject data and shows that the critical wet-bulb temperature is closer to 31.5C,” he says.
Well, people do die in saunas. More often than you might think. And those who can sit through 20 minutes are usually already accustomed to them, it’s not like people can sit for a long time the first time. Stick an unprepared elderly person there and it’s often not going to end well.
Also, right after intense sauna sessions (and in between as well) people dunk themselves into very cold plunge pools or snowdrifts to quickly cool off.
And you got the temperature/humidity ratios wrong. 100% humidity is used in a hammam, a Turkish-style steam room, and those are kept at around 45-55C. Russian saunas never exceed 90%, most are kept at around 70%.
Have you been to one and looked at the hydrometer? It’s really hard to raise the humidity above 70–80%, and the usual for most people 1-2 ladles per ~10 mins barely raises the humidity above 60%.
That works, until… Until the power goes out because everyone has their AC on maximum. After that, it becomes a fight of who has a bigger generator and more gas stored, or who has solar power for the AC.
Homeless have been dying during summer and winter for years. It’s just, as with too many things, the new normal and not newsworthy. If they started dying from critical weather I’m not sure we would even know.
I don’t want to be rude, and I completely am all for combating climate change, but 39C is not baking your insides…
I have been deployed to multiple places that were 52C (~125F) in the day/night with high humidity levels, in full long sleeve/pants for 8 hours at a time. 39C (~102F) is hot, but not bake you from the inside type of hot.
Elderly and sick are people not included in what I said above for obvious reasons.
I don’t know your personal experience and how dangerous it was in regards to temperature, but high temperature environments start feeling pretty humid at like ~50%, so you still pretty much need an actual temperature/humidity reading to gauge it correctly.
So guys, take it to the scientists :) I’m not talking out of my ass here, rather quoting research data. There are a couple dozen papers listed in the link above, and most seem to agree on the dangerous temp region. Read their methodology and reasoning if you’re interested to learn more.
Oh I’m not arguing it’s a hot temp and exerting yourself in those temps is very much a death sentence; especially without water. I’m saying that many people in the world have lived through those temperatures. Research studies have a way of making things a bit more dire than what is normally human survivable, probably for legal/medical moral reasons.
The US military definitely has rules against 40+ WBT and state how many hours of work per hours of rest we could have in high temp+humidity levels. However, I, and anyone who had to deploy or live in East Africa (like Djibouti) or the Middle East can definitely attest, 50WBT is survivable for 8 hours days. Again, not talkin’ elderly or sick persons.
I have never received an inflation beating raise, not once in my life, and I’m 50 years old. The only way to get good raises is to job hop. And anyway, 3%CPI? Have they done any food shopping in the past year?
Saw a store selling a gallon of milk for $7. Was an “upscale” grocery store, but come on. Half a load of bread from the bakery was $8. Where is the other half of my bread?! I walked out
In my 40’s and pretty similar experience. Raises are always 3-5%, with several years where they didn’t even meet that. Hell, I remember one year having manager take me out to lunch and explain to me that the company wasn’t doing any raises that year. The following year I had a new job at ~20% higher salary. And companies wonder why workers have no loyalty anymore. In the end, the only thing that has kept my salary rising faster than inflation is to job hop every 3-5 years. I’d rather not. Hell, I like the company I’m at now and they talk a fantastic game about building a long term career. We’ll see how that pans out come raise time.
I take any long-term pipe dreams with a grain of salt nowadays. I spent 3 years “just six more months” at a time because I believed the owner of the company. Never again.
There have been very few changes, and none in the last few years. And when they made changes last they were small changes that only make the score more accurate:
Changes to the CPI establishment frame (2019-2020)
•Replaced Telephone Point-of-Purchase Survey (TPOPS) as source of retail establishment frame with data from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE)
•Eliminated redundancies and inefficiencies in survey operations and reduced household burden Use of Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages business registry to refine the location and address data from the CE
• Use of Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages business registry to refine the location and address data from the CE
“It’s wrong and most of use know it.” I don’t think most of anyone knows it. And the ones who do are misinformed, repeating false internet narratives without doing any sort of fact checking.
You obviously didn’t read your own article. It dismantles the argument that the calculation is vastly changed, and acknowledges a change in how housing prices are weighted in 1983 might change the equation by 1 point for some people looking to buy a home. Not in the “last two years,” as stated by the comment above.
Owners’ equivalent rent of residences (OER) has nothing to do with the headline CPI numbers. The article you’re referring to literally cites the BLS website, and talks about a separate number not covered by any headlines or indexes in this post.
You are confusing yourself. That article sites the BLS website to explain the differences between core and super core indexes. Both are publicly available, and neither are new. The formula for either number hasn’t changed significantly in decades (1983 when housing price weight was changed).
I used to listen and try to understand when I lived in rural counties in the US. Now all I hear is…
Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
This patronizing attitude is part of the reason politicians like Trump has become popular. He talks to these people who the "civilized" part of the country is totally ignoring. You care about climate change, and so do I. But what if you live near a coal mine that has slowly been phased out? You see your town which your grandfather lived in slowly rots away. You see America as a failing country - you see stores closing. You see people moving away. People dying from opiate overdose. Unemployment and depression
These people have real and legitimate grievances. Their government has failed them - which is why anti-establishment figures like Trump is such a lightning rod for their energy. Then we go and tell them that we need to make sacrifices for the climate. What are they supposed to think? What more do they have to give?
Ignoring these people and pretending like they don't matter or are totally irrational is going to help lead to fascism in this country. Any real revolutionary movement will have to incorporate the whole of America. We need these people on our side.
TRhis is an extremely good point. I fear a further polarisatoon of society is almost inevitable, it seems we (different bubbles in society) are slowly drifting apart like tectonic plates. A process like that is hard to slow down, let alone stop or reverse.
Cry me a river. Clinton had a plan to retrain and retool these coal towns your describing into productive green energy leaders and they rejected it because she eats babies and wind farms kill birds, or whatever. They are totally irrational and I'm not going to keep pretending otherwise. The real government failure is lack of education spending and critical thinking skills (thanks GOP) that is going to take generations to correct.
Edit: I'll add there are sparks of "hope" in rural america now that farmers are seeing the impacts of climate change effecting their yields, I think they are starting to come around. Probably too late, but it's something...
So how do we prevent the rise of fascism this generation? There’s already serious and increasing calls to violent action, since of which have been acted on, with little to no consequences.
Impossible to say, there is no easy or immediate fix that I can imagine. I've basically accepted the underlying threat of fascism is something we are going to be dealing with for the rest of our time on the planet. Continue to vote to keep fascists off the levers of power, continue to protest whenever they have the levers, and pray the wheels of justice ground finely for enemies of democracy. Perhaps our kids or grandkids will find themselves in a better situation for their times...
They are totally irrational and I’m not going to keep pretending otherwise
The real government failure is lack of education spending and critical thinking skills (thanks GOP) that is going to take generations to correct.
We do ourselves no favors by reinforcing the cultural divisions drawn by the upper classes “media elite”. We have more in common with rural conservatives than with wealthy liberals, and we should stop pretending otherwise. Continued disenfranchisement only serves to divide us more.
I’ll add there are sparks of “hope” in rural america now that farmers are seeing the impacts of climate change effecting their yields, I think they are starting to come around.
That’s just reality creeping in past the bullshit cultural propaganda of the last 50 years. It has always been true that low-income rural counties share the same problems and interests as the lower class urban progressives. We just need to stop feeding into it.
These people have real and legitimate grievances. Their government has failed them.
Yes, they do and yes, they think it has. The problem is that they have been in the business of voting for people who campaign on the “Government is bad, vote for us and we’ll show you just how bad we can make it.” It’s their own fucking fault that the government doesn’t work as well as it could. And despite their best efforts we still manage to have rural internet to connect them to the world in places where they would never be able to afford it, interstate roads to send their crops to market and bring every modern amenity to their local stores, a national air transport system to bring them a new liver or kidney after they’ve destroyed theirs, working ports to bring their tractors and 4 wheelers and snowmobiles, billions upon billions of dollars in (otherwise unaffordable) crop insurance and price supports for their products, and an army of adjusters with stacks of cash to rebuild after every tornado, flood, heatwave, snowstorm, hurricane, and forest fire.
The government has not failed them, they have failed their government. Their hand is out whenever they have a bad day, but their memory is wiped out every time they see that all those benefits might cost money.
There’s only so much handholding you can do for people who actively refuse to listen to facts and science that tell them their way of life, based on the mining of fossil fuels, is long past being sustainable. The best I can offer is my sympathies that they ignored the same writing on the wall that the rest of us have been reading for a couple of decades. It’s on Daddy and Grandpa for not telling their kids that the “family business” is a bad future career choice and not directing them towards something with a more sustainable outlook.
I agree with the idea behind this post, and its why I always approach right wingers with an attitude of education. Their opinons (which themselves are caused by legitimate grievances) are accellerated by ignorance. They cant argue or debate because their viewpoint is not a realistic representation of what has to be done. Their platform has turned into a joke, and thats honestly disappointing to see.
The increase in right-wing extremism is only fueling further ignorance, and radicalized ideas never hold up in any kind of evidence-based debate.
I’m going to address a single point here; these people grievances are at this point, unfortunately, the consequences to their own actions.
Hillary had a clear path for moving these rurale areas into future looking manufacturing jobs, and people who would have been helped by those exact investments laughed her off and voted for Trump in trove. Then Trump closed plenty of factories while just boating he’d save jobs the same days those jobs were laid off.
The government didn’t fail them. They failed the government.
If you live somewhere where there’s no work, and you don’t do anything to help yourself, I don’t really have much sympathy. That’s not the government’s problem, it’s yours.
Now if you’re disabled or something that’s a different story, and we do have programs to help those people. But “regular” people who can’t understand that times change shouldn’t hold everyone else back.
You can’t engage with people who want to murder their perceived enemies. Sorry that it sucks to live in a rural area, but they have to regain some semblance of sanity before a conversation can take place.
Yeah we absolutely need to find ways to revitalize the rust belt and Appalachia in climate friendly ways. But it should be remembered that when they’re offered compromises that help them I’ve seen plenty get mad. Like yeah Appalachia has suffered for coal’s death, but the jobs aren’t coming back. It just doesn’t take a town to level mountains for coal. And nobody has suffered more for coal’s presence than small coal towns. They’re still poisoned from the mining runoff. And even without decarbonizing coal isn’t coming back. It’s too expensive and inefficient compared to solar and natural gas.
The point wasn't the rare coal town but the perception that pervades the rural areas of this country. It doesn't have to be coal towns - there are similar stories for all smallish cities across the Rust Belt for example. You're focusing on a specific when really the point is that fascism grows only in poor economic situations.
These people are legitimately suffering and they are turning to hate as a response. Trust me, you or me could have easily been in their shoes had we been in their position. But just like they have been swayed to hate, I think it's possible to sway them to socialism as long as you call it something other than socialism.
Zizek has talked about this before where Trump supporters in 2016 were a hair's breadth away from being Bernie supporters. While a bit of a dramatic statement, there is some truth in this. When the economic situation is unstable, radicalism grows in both directions - left and right. Which is why around the same time period we saw an openly socialist candidate for president in the US receive about 6% of the general vote - while we also saw massive Nazi rallies in New York City.
Everything is connected. We are fighting for the hearts and minds of the same people.
In theory I agree with everything you said. In this specific example I don’t buy it. The people threatening this weather man aren’t taking that position because climate change legislation is hurting them personally. They’ve just brainwashed by right wing propoganda
Was more to do with the comment I replied to than the original post
Magic sky man scary me no like. Bad man make planet hot because we be naughty.
I used to listen and try to understand when I lived in rural counties in the US. Now all I hear is…
Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Sure, people making death threats to weathermen are nutters. But majority of people living in these areas are not so crazy, even ones that lean Trumpers
So you’re saying that temps are rising because we’re releasing all the sun’s stored energy back into the air, and not because some dude likes another man?
Suggestion: Not smile like idiots, not pose for pictures in front of a representation of a tangible threat to humanity that’s actively killing people. Maybe if press does show up, be informed experts as stewards of that land and tell people it’s not a fun joke and they’re at the center of a growing problem with a global impact.
You know, basic decent human stuff…
P.S. Go right on back to Reddit if you want to make snarky, hollow comments ending in lmao, tool.
Mr. DeSantis, why can’t the people of Florida get privately owned homeowners insurance from capitalist corporations?
Why does Florida suck at capitalism?
Is it because of climate change … or is it because fascism isn’t actually good for business, it just pretends to be, while assassinating the businesses it doesn’t like?
Could it be … BOTH?
Either way, you’re a piece of shit, Mr. DeSantis, and you can go to hell.
It already exists. It’s called Citizens Property Insurance and I’m one of over a million subscribers to it. Every private company is at least 20% more expensive or the state could sell my policy to the private company.
Not exactly. Citizens has been around for a long time. If you want to find some of the usual GOP grift here in FL, take look at all DeSantis’ donors/college buddies/whatever that are now getting the legal work for defending the state against Disney’s lawsuits. That’s a lot of money…but that’s a separate issue from Citizens, which legitimately fills a need.
Whoa now. That is some prejudiced and elitest reporting. How dare anyone acknowledge the problems in florida, the sunshine state that is perfect.
In all seriousness: It sounds like this is being a bit over reported, but the extent to which they are pulling out remains to be seen. And it is going to REALLY suck for florida as people are stuck holding mortgages for condemned and washed away houses.
But it also sets a really concerning precedent. California has already seen issues (but, being a functioning government, are setting up government programs to protect people from wildfires). But more and more of the country/world are going to become uninhabitable over the next few decades and insurance companies are likely to pull out of risky areas and just raise premiums elsewhere.
Texas is always at a high risk of someone plugging their phone charger into the wrong outlet and taking out the grid for the entire state. They are a special kind of stupid
Arizona is interesting. They definitely have massive drought issues. But wildfire wise, they tend to be pretty okay. I assume because there isn’t enough moisture to actually grow trees to burn but I am sure it is more complex than that.
Which isn’t something insurance covers and thus not applicable here.
You can’t (easily) file a claim because “it is hot as balls outside”. You can (generally) file a claim for “my house burned down”.
The planet becoming more and more inhospitable is one side of this hell. But the issue with insurance companies pulling out is that it leaves the owners holding the bag. The bag, in this case, being a massive mortgage on a condemned plot of land.
“Hot as balls” raises workers’ comp. and health insurance payouts, people getting heat exhaustion and heat stroke, even heart and respiratory diseases can be brought on or worsened by heat.
The risk in CA is that they have built so many communities in areas that are prone to wild fires (and in some cases are even part of the natural eco system) that is inevitable that if they rebuild that it will burn down again. They also have high material costs, higher labor costs, and more stringent building codes (rebuilding to code can get really expensive). Lastly CA has a more highly regulated insurance market which protects consumers, but makes it less profitable for insurance companies. While IMO this is a good thing it has ripple effects on whether or not the private market wants to participate.
florida as people are stuck holding mortgages for condemned and washed away houses.
I mean what is the issue with just not paying them? For a big enough hurricane there will be too many delinquent mortgages, so it might be easy to hide or just tell the bank that the free market is harsh mistress and sucks their risk didn’t pay off.
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