Here's the website for the project: https://www.shakealert.org/

Shouldn't the insurance companies have a huge incentive to see this built?

I imagine that most of the losses in an earthquake are property losses. These don't seem like they'll be significantly mitigated by a one minute warning.

Perhaps life/health insurance? I'm not sure the average costs of injury associated with earthquakes but it could be substantial

I guess the average person doesn't have very much life insurance (<$100k on average per person). Looks like about 100 people have died from earthquakes in the last 30 years in CA, so maybe that gives you $10M in life insurance expenditures.

Health-wise, let's say every injury has cost $30k on average (IMO a very generous estimate). Looks like there have been about ten thousand injuries or so over the last thirty years. So that's $300M.

Let's say for the sake of argument that an early warning system reduces losses by 50%. So that gives us $150M in value over thirty years. Or about $7.5M per year in value. (Less, really, because value saved in the future has to be discounted.)

That doesn't really go very far even toward maintaining an existing system, to say nothing of developing a new one. (Assuming the last thirty years is representative, that my napkin math is good, etc.)

Interesting points, it made me stumble on an article about how much USG regulations generally spend per life saved.

Spoiler: it varies wildly.

Writeup: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/blog/id/93/how-much-are-we...

Citing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=424523

Here are some illustrative examples:

* Consumer Product Safety Commission's (CPSC's) regulation on childproof lighters = $100k

* Federal Aviation Administration rules on airplane cabin fire protection = $300K

* National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration rules on passive restraints and seat belts = $500K

* CPSC's rules on children's sleepwear flammability = $2.2MM

* EPA's rules on fugitive benzene emissions = $3.7MM

Probably a better way to guesstimate the "value" of a life is to look at the wages that would have been earned if alive. The median income of a worker in the US earns $44k/year, and can probably expect to work another 30 years for retirement (median US age is 37). Multiply those numbers together, and the median death would have earned $1.2M. If you do more rigorous probability distributions, you could probably build a better estimation of what this number would be. Of course, you could also argue for more precise estimates of someone's value than their wages. But the magnitude of the number does appear to gel with regulatory thought: most regulatory agencies seem to do cost-benefit analysis of regulations assuming that saving a life is worth costing at most a few million. $100K per life does seem quite low.

Your estimate is sound, but GP was talking about value (money saved) for health insurance companies.

A hedge fund might have motivation do it, but I don't know how one would reconcile the cross purposes of knowing the info ahead of time for stock trades vs warning the public asap.

One can trade and warn the public simultaneously.

If you're worried about getting claim-jumped by an HFT firm subscribed to the public-warning system, a few millisecond delay might allow for trade execution?

Once you plan for any delay then the ethical/financial discussion then goes to why not 0.1s or 1 second or two? It might be more ethically balanced, and less of a PR nightmare if a hedge fund were satisfied with maybe matched parallel feed and the advantage they get for just having the infrastructure to respond to a richer signal sent at the same time as the public warning. The public warning is a yes or no to send, but the feed might have added data such as uncertainty, or initial locations.. etc.

You mean the ones that don't cover earthquakes?

most people in California don't have earthquake insurance.