That was the single time in my life I’ve ever, ever been so glad for liability insurance in my life. They covered everything. The hotel had to repaint and replace walls, servers, furniture, carpet, paintings, etc.
Always get liability insurance riders on your home/rental insurance. It’s usually only a few extra bucks a month. Totally worth it in the event something like a sink overflow fails to stop a sink from overflowing while you are asleep.
Anyway, I learned later that my little catastrophe coincided with a number of other little catastrophes which caused them to need to make a claim on their reinsurance company.
Contributory negligence would decline all coverage if the insured in any way contributed to the event.
I'm guessing the hotel filed a property damage claim with their insurance, who then sued the commenter, whose liability insurance worked things out with the hotel's insurance company.
You're right, the commenter would be covered 100%, but their insurance might have only paid out a fraction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_negligence (apparently it’s a similar concept you have in comparative negligence)
I once thought all bathroom sinks had a little drain hole in the side to prevent overflows. But not all do. (in places I've lived in my area of the US)
Y’all know that post about the importance of walking and getting off your phone? I’m your altogether-normal, socialized coworker that’s in the bathtub 2:30-3:00PM doing pretty much the same thing being described there. What a place to be and think!
Sorry I can’t respond to your IM right this second, I’m thinking about the fill rate of my glorious tub, it’s failsafe features, the pothos over my head, the spider friend in the corner, and - before you get too concerned - whether these new bugs warrant further review of network architecture we’re building out.
I love the tub, and I make no apologies for it. Good morning HN, thanks for reading.
Not common at all in the US though new construction may include them in laundry rooms.
They’re actually a really smart idea and pretty much eliminates the risk of a water source leaking.
There's a lot of terms that you can physically write into a contract, but that courts won't enforce against retail customers.
One of my acquaintances at Uni did the same during our freshers week, no issues with IT infrastructure, but he did manage to comprehensively flood a conference room which was located below his room in the same building. They were carrying the soft furnishings out for most of the following day after the flood was discovered.
He set a new record in being summoned to the authorities for a serious dressing down before term had even properly started. Also earned himself a nickname he never escaped.
Protip - renters insurance is a great deal, it's dirt cheap, only a few bucks a month.
See here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-insurance/insure...
The IOC had 800 Million insurance and overall was 2-3 Billion. It would be really interesting to understand how to price an 800 Million Olymoic insurace policy
It was a simpler time, before autocorrect errors dominated, and it was also a fun Friday night. The somewhat regular “Adam bot” in “party mode alerts were just little bit more amusing to be woken up by late at night when things were broken.
Officer: Sir, how high are you?
Dude: No officer, it’s high how are you
I am personally, barely, three sheets to the wind - I've only guzzled two bottles of red!
Especially if use the same messenger app both for work and for personal use. And by "personal use" I mean sharing porn with your significant other.
https://www.sbnation.com/tennis/2020/4/8/21214031/wimbledon-...
> The All England Club reportedly updated its Wimbledon insurance policy years ago to include the infectious disease clause following the worldwide SARS outbreak in 2002.
https://www.sbnation.com/tennis/2020/4/8/21214031/wimbledon-...
Cat bonds are fascinating. What you describe is one of many structures. In essence, bank loans are to bond markets as reinsurers are to cat bonds.
I'd love to hear someone elaborate on this, as I don't understand.
There's a bit of a legal difference. And bonds are expected to be traded relatively easily, but your creditor selling your loan to someone else is not quite as common.
A re-insurer is someone who insures insurance companies. Many insurance contracts for you as an individual have you pay for the first few (thousand..) dollars of damage, and the insurance companies covers everything afterwards.
Of that liability, insurance companies cover the first few (million) dollars of damage, and often pass on the excess liability afterwards to yet another specialised company. The re-insurer.
Catastrophe bonds are a way for bond investors to take the liability that would normally go to re-insurers. Of course, in return for taking on some liability, they get paid. Just like you pay your insurance company a premium.
I've always how that worked. Like, who is the employee at the insurance company who takes that call, and how do they decide what's just too risky, when there can't be much historical data on risk?
The question that's asked is "would XYZ claim be covered under the terms of our current policy". Usually the best answer I've been able to get is "probably so". The unique challenge in the case of an intentionally planned dangerous stunt is that most such policies are intended to cover "claims of negligence related accidental liability."
If you planned to do something you knew had a high likelihood of being dangerous, that's not an "accident." Many such policies have specific limitations, stipulations and requirements to remain in force. For example, purchasing a liability insurance rider to cover a large corporate party may have limitations like limiting the number of people, stipulations like all the bartenders must have training on not serving inebriated guests and requirements such as having hired paramedics present.
When you file a large claim on such an insurance policy, they will check that you were in full compliance with all the policy requirements before paying out. Source: I know an attorney who works in a law firm specializing in policy holders suing their own insurance company when they refuse a claim. I'm sure there are good insurance companies and bad but based on the stories I've heard you definitely want to make sure you're in compliance under any policy you're substantially relying on.
Ring Insurance company rep sees caller ID: "Oh no. What have they thought up THIS time?"
I suspect that it is the underwriters, who are responsible for assessing risks and determining what constraints and requirements must be met to claim insurance. Their work can be highly mathematical and, other times, they will just look at the underwriting guidelines and say "No, we won't let you test a homemade parachute on a living human because your team are not professional parachute manufacturers with valid indemnity insurance we can mitigate our risk against."
Production companies and financiers won’t show up if the insurance company won’t
Also there is the ease of having video evidence and so many witnesses that have different goals
1. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJtitKU0CAeg88RBY08TZ...
It's a clause that specifically excludes certain specific actions from coverage.
I'd encourage you to read your own insurance policies, they are fairly easy to understand..
I'd love to hear some of these stories. I've never had any visibility into the world of insurance, but it's always kinda fascinated me.
Young man riding a motorcycle, accident, suffers catastrophic but non-fatal head trauma. Problem 1, part I: Requires assisted living for the rest of his life. Problem 2: He has the hormones of a young man, the muscles of a young man, but the intellectual capacity and emotional regulation of a baby. Requires a very specific type of assisted living care that can handle violent behaviour and possible sexual assault. Problem 1, part II: His lifespan is estimated to be longer than usual, because he can no longer do things like ride motorcycles, smoke cigarettes, or have a stressful job.
Put those things together, and the estimated total payout was well into eight figures. The motorcycle insurance company was on the hook for his care, and they had insured their portfolio, so everything over their $1,000,000 deductible (or whatever it was) fell on the reinsurance company.
Flood happens in a place where floods are uncommon, e.g. Tornado hitting Barrie, Ontario. Home insurance companies are hit with hundreds, even thousands of claims. Most are not in the eight figures, but insurance companies don’t just buy insurance against exceptional claims, they also buy insurance against single events like floods triggering unusually large numbers of claims that would otherwise fall below the deductible.
This is what reinsurance is for, so the interesting bit to me is what my client related: It seems that a statistically improbable number of people just happened to have all their furniture in the basement while they were painting their house or some such, and it all got ruined, so the insurer is on the hook for replacing furniture that wouldn’t normally be in the basement (we are not talking about people with furniture in finished basements, we are talking about people claiming they were storing furniture in their basements).
Normally they have the bandwidth to investigate such wild claims and reject most of them, but when they all come at once, the insurance company looks very bad if they tell everyone to wait a month or three while they work through a backlog of investigations. So they lay off their losses on the reinsurance ompany.
After regaling me with stories about improbable events and how much the reinsurance company had to pay, the GM of the office I dealt with told me that he owned two cottages:
One “entertaining” million-dollar cottage on a lake in Muskoka, Ontario, where one could jet-ski and power-boat.
And one “get away from it all” cottage on a different lake that had a 5km/hr speed limit, effectively barring motorized sports.
From this I deduced that for all their wild payouts, they were running a good business that could afford to pay its management quite handsomely.
This particular (small) reactor is insured for liability up to 1.2 billion euro.
We have been ignoring that massive risk in favor of "cheap" electricity for decades, and every time something happened, in the end the taxpayers had to cover the bill.
Nuclear simply is financially unviable once externalities are properly accounted for. Add to that cost and time overruns in projects, the still unsolved questions of where to dump the waste, of nuclear weapon fuel proliferation... and just forget about fission-based nuclear projects, please.
[1] https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761...
Renewables like solar and wind are great of course, but they're intermittent and cause weird issues like the Duck Curve. You still need base load from either nuclear or fossil fuels for a stable, reliable grid.
This isn't an unsolved problem, just an uneconomical one - there isn't enough waste for any of the possible solutions to be economical. The solution to getting rid of nuclear waste, is to produce enough of it to make R&D worthwhile.
> of nuclear weapon fuel proliferation
But how does this relate to power plants? The military will get its nukes, whether or not the plants are built.
The problem is that the plutonium will be created in the first place and needs to be taken extra care of to make sure the stuff doesn't get stolen or "misplaced" and then diverted off to terrorists.
- loss of life and the economic productivity of people who died early (not just the liquidators, but also everyone who got radiation damage!)
- loss of sellability of goods - to this day, Bavarian shroom collectors and hunters have to check fungi or wild animals for radiation, and in particularly bad years up to 70% of wild pigs have to be discarded due to irradiation [1]. That's an economic loss for the hunters and for all subsequent economic activities (butchers, restaurants).
- healthcare cost associated with dealing with the fallout - cancers are the most expensive illnesses known to mankind
- loss of quality of life in those who were displaced by the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, additionally also the cost of relocating and the loss of opportunities, social networks etc. caused by the relocating
- loss of economic potential that could have been realized in the area around Chernobyl, had it not been contaminated
[1] https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article230648425/35-Jahre-n...
Also, these costs seem specific to a melt-down. Fukushima wasn't just poorly insured, it failed to heed studies warning about its location.
And I it's great for the wealthy.
Forcing insurance on poor people is not right.
The poor have a tough enough time just keeping their head above homelessness.
I have been required to pay for automotive insurance in California for approximately 20 years. (In CA mandatory insurance was required, but not mandatory forever. There is a weird legal difference. I white knuckled my college years while driving. I got lucky except onetime. A wealthy women slammed into me, and the minute she, or actually her lawyer husband, found out I didn't have insurance, I was putty in their hands. I paid $1000 for an 1982 Volvo bumper. It was the last of my student loan, but they had me. A call to DMV and I wouldn't be able to commute to my school.)
Every year if I want to drive my old truck I needed to come up with $600.00 plus. Even with a perfect record since 15.5 years of age.
I only can afford the minimum. I never made much money even as college graduate. I believe it's 15-30-5. (this means if slam into you and you are a vegetable; you will get $15,000 for injuries, and $5,000 for your Tesla. Great payday? If you have money you can go after my assets.).
My point is it's not enough if we are being honest.
The insurance industry loves these minimum mandates because they make billions off the poor, and middleclass.
It's no wonder the insurance industry is always the number #1 Lobby group on every political fund.
It's a racket, and I believe the bigger boys are colluding on rates, but can't prove it.
"Buy the per mile insurance dude--you low income loser!"
(1. Work out the low income insurance on a yearly basis, and it's not copasetic. Plus my old Toyota does not have a computer other than a rudimentary computer that was suspose to control the main plunger in the naturally aspirated carb that never really worked. Meaning there's no computer to plug a mileage indication in. So there's no per mile insurance I can get.)
My point is mandated insurance is kind of a racket like this two year mandated Smog check, especially on vechicles that that we only use a few times per year, or under 1000 miles/per year.
Rant Over.
Just give poor people money, instead of a million special programs with extra bureaucracy and red tape.
In /some/ places, car insurance is required by law. How does it work in places where it is not required by law? At first thought, it appears more financially risky to drive! I guess that insurance would be even more expensive because it is more likely that the other side is insured.
Looking this up for the US (the country where I live), it seems that only NH doesn't require car insurance (ninja edit: Virginia as well). So for me, this is an interesting hypothetical, but not in a way that's a part of my reality as I do not live in either of those two states.
>>At first thought, it appears more financially risky to drive!
As someone who does not own a car, and does not drive (and is poor - very poor in HN standards as well as in the city I live in), I would like drivers that I share the road with to have insurance, rather than drive without insurance. Getting hit by an uninsured driver would be an absolute nightmare that I doubt I could even afford to bring to court.
Not sure about the specifics of your car insurance but mine would cover that.
I'm not from Nova Scotia, but we have the same principle of mandatory insurance that has to cover also the accidents caused by people who are violating the requirements, which doesn't add much since the requirements are strictly enforced and violations are not that common, but mitigates those rare cases.
And I know how OP worded their post, but legally in my state you have to have insurance and despite that not every driver actually has insurance. It's not like anyone checks your insurance when you put the keys in the ignition...
Each driving session is statistically independent. The probability of you getting in a vehicle accident resets every time you get behind the wheel. The actual probability in each session varies based on things like your alertness level, vehicle condition, weather conditions, traffic levels, and so on.
Something you can do to reduce your premiums is to shop around every 3-4 years. Most of the big-name insurance companies will start raising your rates around that time-frame because they assume the hassle of changing companies will keep you with them (i.e. human inertia). Another way is to drive "old man" cars. They're usually bigger & heavier, and perform better in accidents than something small & zippy. So they get lower rates because the chance of high medical bills is reduced.
What's your evidence for that?
I'm going to assume you are a reasonably competent driver. Also, that your driving routine is pretty stable. Now these assumptions may not apply to you, but they do apply in general, which is what you need to set insurance risk.
Traffic density on your Wed commute to work is pretty stable week over week, with approximately the same percentage of over-tired or over-stressed drivers.
Your driving ability has probably not significantly improved over the last 6 months.
Thus, your chance of getting into an accident this morning on the way to work is independent of the chance of you having an accident next Wednesday.
Likewise, your chance of getting into an accident this morning is independent of the chance of your co-worker who lives on the other side of town but has a similar risk profile to you of the commute (same type of roads, same distances).
In general, in aggregate. Y
Someone who just had five accidents in the last three weeks might drive differently today, don't you think?
And what good is it trying to sue a “poor person”?
While I never had to sue anyone, I looked into all of the hoops you have to jump through to collect damages when I was a landlord. It wasn’t worth the time or the effort.
The insurance company was going to look into suing the driver, but it's not like there was even enough money there to pay for the lawyers.
They go to covering your risk of loss from damages causes by an actor from whom funds cannot be recovered.
> And what good is it trying to sue a “poor person”?
None, often, that's a large part of what you are insuring against by having uninsured driver insurance.
And in my original comment i was speaking to the nomenclature of "everyone has $1mm liability insurance" rather than anything else. I hadn't eaten all day and it shows in my comment history full of snark and toeing the line of being a decent person.
Because that is what uninsured motorist insurance is for? If you buy flood insurance and it floods…
But for those without such a deep bench, they, like other commenters mentioned do a round robin sort of thing.
(I went with a bit more, because stocks are more volatile than cash.)
If they have to pay out on their reinsurance of your home policies the fact that you've reinsured their auto policies does not help them.
Someone has to insure their reinsurance of your home policies, don't they?
So there's a limit to how much they need to re-insure.
Someone already said that the rabbit hole ends with eg Berkshire Hathaway. But it also ends with eg (retail) investors who hold catastrophe bonds or shares of insurance companies.
The cost was mind-boggling, millions upon millions. It nearly bankrupt his insurance company.
It's just that morally we treat insurance differently; and society has developed some moral and ethical rules around this topic. But because the mathematical structures are so similar, you can guess that the moral rules have lots of grey areas.
(Similar for financial derivatives. Eg farmers use wheat futures to lock in the prices for next year's harvest today. Speculators use the same futures to 'gamble' on prices.)
Some whole-life policies carry cash value and are an investment vehicle as well, so you can potentially make money on them surviving as well. This seems ethically-better, but most life insurance is term life that doesn't have this investment upside.
The mathematics are similar from the ensurer/casino side. However:
1. The happiness impact of losing 5x your net worth (house burnt down, eternal debt) is likely much bigger than gaining it.
2. It's harder to repeat sell insurance to someone until they are broke, compared to a slot machine.
If you take bets on how companies will do in the future, it's called finance or investment services. If you take bets on human misery, it's called insurance. And if you take bets on sports, it called gambling.
Businesses in all three have, for good reasons, the reputation of being predatory.
If the insurance company doesn’t sell enough of these kinds of policies to reliably offset payouts with premiums, they might turn around and buy a policy from a reinsurance company with a $10,000,000 limit and a $100,000 deductible against their entire portfolio.
Thus, reinsurance companies spend a lot of time thinking about things that don’t happen very often but can be very expensive when they happen.
And yes, they had a division that did propositions like hole-in-ones, and also they insured legal betting companies against wild trifectas and that sort of thing.
I have a small trove of stories they told me about bizarre accidents that wound up costing enormous amounts of money.