Elixir
Made in America
It was. Honest.
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Climate Change(d)?
- Thread starter Jimmy Higgins
- Start date
It was. Honest.
thebeave
Contributor
Damn. Was that was the year that cats and dogs began living together?
Tharmas
Veteran Member
The Climate Denier's Progress
1. There's no such thing as climate change. It's a government plot to control the citizens and destroy the oil industry.*
2. OK, so there is climate change, but it's normal, not man-made. The climate has always been changing throughout history.
3. OK, there is climate change and it is caused by human activity, but it'll be good for us! More CO2 means the plants grow bigger and faster, and the Canadian plains will have two growing seasons.
*The Texas Attorney General is suing the government over expanded protections for endangered species in the oil fields. It's a plot to destroy the oil industry he says.
1. There's no such thing as climate change. It's a government plot to control the citizens and destroy the oil industry.*
2. OK, so there is climate change, but it's normal, not man-made. The climate has always been changing throughout history.
3. OK, there is climate change and it is caused by human activity, but it'll be good for us! More CO2 means the plants grow bigger and faster, and the Canadian plains will have two growing seasons.
*The Texas Attorney General is suing the government over expanded protections for endangered species in the oil fields. It's a plot to destroy the oil industry he says.
pood
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Part four: OK, there is human-caused climate change, and the whole world is on fire, including me, but, this is fine! (Pic of smiling idiot seated in sea of flames).
pood
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Hey, but what’s the weather in Santa Monica?
Elixir
Made in America
It’s raining $100 bills, as usual.
Jimmy Higgins
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Insurance companies certainly are one of the things I've raised in this thread. They are reacting, and the nation needs to figure out how to manage this.
The brain trust will say 'don't build next to the coast'. Great idea. Most of the heavily impacted areas from Helene are hundreds of miles from the coast.
hyzer
Veteran Member
How about: "Don't build in a Red State."
Check out 99% Invisible Podcast Mini Series: Not Built for This.
One note about the insurance industry, yes, they will raise rates, but it is a highly regulated industry. And constituents will complain to their legislators and all of the increases will be rolled back or they will pass legislation that provides additional coverage. We have always subsidized poor decisions about building along all coasts and will be forced to continue to allow people to make these bad decisions. The entire idea that we let anyone build on a barrier island is ludicrous. It's a barrier island that is protecting the mainland. Building on it changes everything including the ability of the island to be a barrier.
Jimmy Higgins
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Hurricane Milton is looking to rewrite the Atlantic Hurricane record book. It went from Cat 1 Hurricane to strong Cat 5 (by Cat 5 standards) in less than 24 hours. What is rapid intensification? That is!
175 mph winds, pressure of 911 mb already make it one of the strongest on record in the last 150 or so years. Atlantic records are 190 mph / 882 mb. Milton's pressure drop is rivaling WIlma. In the same year several states got fucked up hundreds of miles from the coast by Helene and the earliest Cat 5 was recorded in the Atlantic.
Shear and dry air are forecasted to weaken Milton to merely a strong Cat 3 upon landfall. There will be widespread storm surge, but this is Florida. Hopefully the weakening occurs. Of course, due to the laws of physics, if Milton weakens, it should grow in size.
175 mph winds, pressure of 911 mb already make it one of the strongest on record in the last 150 or so years. Atlantic records are 190 mph / 882 mb. Milton's pressure drop is rivaling WIlma. In the same year several states got fucked up hundreds of miles from the coast by Helene and the earliest Cat 5 was recorded in the Atlantic.
Shear and dry air are forecasted to weaken Milton to merely a strong Cat 3 upon landfall. There will be widespread storm surge, but this is Florida. Hopefully the weakening occurs. Of course, due to the laws of physics, if Milton weakens, it should grow in size.
bilby
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Well, that's the Democrats for you. The Republican Party has been trying to repeal those laws for decades, and have met with nothing but obstructionism and negativity from the Democratic Party.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Imagine when all you had for a storm warning was a barometer.
The problem is no one is talking about long term panning in Florida.
I moved to the Seattle area in 1990. Every there when the Cascades snow melted there was reporting on a river up north flooding. Videos of fish swimming in streets and flooded hones ion a river up north.
People built houses close to the river banks.
Finally building codes were changed to require new hones be built above the high water mark.
Insurance companies are pulling out of Florida.
Miami has been moving back from the shore for a while, roads were getting flooded durng high tides and regular storms.
Maybe the Tampa Bay Buccs stadium will become an aquarium.
The problem is no one is talking about long term panning in Florida.
I moved to the Seattle area in 1990. Every there when the Cascades snow melted there was reporting on a river up north flooding. Videos of fish swimming in streets and flooded hones ion a river up north.
People built houses close to the river banks.
Finally building codes were changed to require new hones be built above the high water mark.
Insurance companies are pulling out of Florida.
Miami has been moving back from the shore for a while, roads were getting flooded durng high tides and regular storms.
Maybe the Tampa Bay Buccs stadium will become an aquarium.
Alcoholic Actuary
Veteran Member
The insurance industry has been 'reacting' to this since the '04 '05 nightmares where there was hurricane landfall every week. Severity hasn't really been an issue for insurers (and potentially still isn't) because of the amount of capital available through insurance linked securities, cat bonds, and reinsurance.
The problem going forward is going to be in the lack of frequency based covers available in the retro-capital market. A 50 year or 100 year event isn't difficult, even if we've miscalculated by 25 years because severity capital is renewable every year. But when a 100 year event happens twice in two weeks - there isn't a supportable market.
We've seen this happen with the flood market 50 years ago, and more recently in CA with wildfires 6 years ago. There have already been a ton of exits and bankruptcies in FL by smaller capitalized companies and FL only writers. Once the Libertys and Berkshire Hathaways and Chubbs of the world exit a territory, there will be no insurance there.
I've brought this up before, but there will be a time in the next 10 years where the only policy you will get for your personal property are the old Fire and Allied lines policies that exclude most weather related damage.
aa
Elixir
Made in America
So I take it we can look forward to ever-increasing numbers of alcoholic actuaries?
Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
May I relate an interesting anecdote about another insurance failure circa 1980? You can read about it on-line, or view my summary in spoiler tags.
IBM mainframes were a major product in the 1970's; and third-party companies got heavily into the act: Leasing IBM mainframes, maintaining them, enhancing them, or even (almost) duplicating them from scratch. I was involved in technical niches of this, but some of the big-picture business events did come to my attention.
IBM would sell, lease or rent its mainframes and there were big differences in procedures for the three cases. (For example, rental machines might be billed HOURLY; when doing maintenance IBM engineers needed to insert a key so that customer billings wouldn't accrue as the time meter clicked.
And some of the "shenanigans" committed by the add-on industry were permitted only for SOLD machines, machines over which IBM had no control.
IBM sold its mainframes for approximately three times the lease price, or $3 million for a machine that leased for $1 million per year. If the machine lasted for five years that's $2 million extra profit. Some companies saw an easy way to make money: They would buy the machine but undercut IBM sharply on the lease price. If the machine could be leased for 5 or 6 years, these leasing companies -- of which Itel was the largest and most famous -- would make a handy profit.
To sweeten the deal, they got underwriters at Lloyds of London to ensure the mainframes against depreciation!! Think of it. It was a guy named Peter Nottage IIUC, working for the partners at Lloyds, who started writing policies that effectively insured that IBM mainframes would have residual value. He made a fortune as premium payments rolled in.
But the mainframes did NOT have residual value. IBM, true to Moore's Law, introduced better machines every several years. Indeed, the market price of obsolete mainframes eventually tracked the price of gold! The only practical value the old mainframes had was to extract their precious metals.
Lloyds lost some Hundreds of $Millions on the deal -- one of their very biggest losses ever -- but that was not nearly enough to save Itel from bankruptcy. This was all big news in the computer industry. How many of you had heard about it?
(I've other interesting anecdotes. Like Harrah's Casinos' new data center with Itel-leased computers where the Mad Hungarian and I spent an interesting afternoon.)
-- From the interesting(?) trivia desk.
IBM would sell, lease or rent its mainframes and there were big differences in procedures for the three cases. (For example, rental machines might be billed HOURLY; when doing maintenance IBM engineers needed to insert a key so that customer billings wouldn't accrue as the time meter clicked.
And some of the "shenanigans" committed by the add-on industry were permitted only for SOLD machines, machines over which IBM had no control.
IBM sold its mainframes for approximately three times the lease price, or $3 million for a machine that leased for $1 million per year. If the machine lasted for five years that's $2 million extra profit. Some companies saw an easy way to make money: They would buy the machine but undercut IBM sharply on the lease price. If the machine could be leased for 5 or 6 years, these leasing companies -- of which Itel was the largest and most famous -- would make a handy profit.
To sweeten the deal, they got underwriters at Lloyds of London to ensure the mainframes against depreciation!! Think of it. It was a guy named Peter Nottage IIUC, working for the partners at Lloyds, who started writing policies that effectively insured that IBM mainframes would have residual value. He made a fortune as premium payments rolled in.
But the mainframes did NOT have residual value. IBM, true to Moore's Law, introduced better machines every several years. Indeed, the market price of obsolete mainframes eventually tracked the price of gold! The only practical value the old mainframes had was to extract their precious metals.
Lloyds lost some Hundreds of $Millions on the deal -- one of their very biggest losses ever -- but that was not nearly enough to save Itel from bankruptcy. This was all big news in the computer industry. How many of you had heard about it?
(I've other interesting anecdotes. Like Harrah's Casinos' new data center with Itel-leased computers where the Mad Hungarian and I spent an interesting afternoon.)
-- From the interesting(?) trivia desk.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Actuaries are the ones who in the end set insurance rates don't they?
Alcoholic Actuary
Veteran Member
That is interesting, thanks. Although I wouldn't call that an 'insurance failure' - the fact that it went to Lloyds means that insurance companies wouldn't touch it. Lloyd's is a gambling casino, not insurance.
aa
Alcoholic Actuary
Veteran Member
We calculate what the actuarially sound rate ought to be. What ends up in the market is what comes out of the Rube Goldberg machine.
aa
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
Actuaries are destined to be replaced by an AI. It is a simple cost-benefit analysis.
Remove the top and bottom stair.