News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by toomuchtodo on Monday October 07, 2024 @11:52AM (#41767233)
Insurance costs are financial signal that your financial decisions are bad. They won't insure high climate risk areas? You don't live there. They won't insure high risk vehicles? You don't buy them. You can ignore this if you're wealthy enough to self insure, but for the rest of us, you don't have to believe in the risk; the financial system and the risk modeler data they consume believes in it for you [1].

My homeowner's insurance through Citizens in Florida is approaching $5k/year. It will likely go up at least $1k/year, if not more, next year. Citizens is requiring all homes to carry flood insurance eventually, even if there is no flood risk. I will likely have to pay a surcharge after Hurricane Milton due to Citizens having insufficient reserves for the amount of climate related claim loss they are experiencing (such is the peril of socialized, insurer of last resort systems). This will likely push me to sell my primary residence, my last property in Florida I have not liquidated, and move somewhere with much lower climate risk. This is the system working as intended, telling people to leave places too expensive to insure.

We are collectively internalizing the previously ignored and/or externalized costs. It should be expected that this process will be painful and messy as risk pricing snaps to reality.

(folks not of means who live where climate risk has accelerated ahead of what they can afford should be bought out and provided assistance to relocate to where the risk is lower, and their property acquired by an entity that will hold it in perpetuity to prevent further development or occupancy, for the record; FEMA does this, but this must be done at a much larger scale imho)

[1] https://firststreet.org/

Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by thfuran on Monday October 07, 2024 @12:03PM (#41767353)
>They won't insure high climate risk areas? You don't live there. They won't insure high risk vehicles? You don't buy them

Yes, but there are already people who own cybertrucks or live in these places.

Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by toomuchtodo on Monday October 07, 2024 @12:05PM (#41767378)
That is unfortunate. Life isn't fair. Not a judgement call, just an observation of the reality we live in. Can't find a Cybertruck insurer and can't self insure? Sell it. If Tesla wants to sell them, they can provide insurance as part of Tesla Insurance [1], if Tesla believes they can effectively manage the risk of their insured cohort and the modeled vehicle losses. If Tesla won't insure their own Cybertrucks, also sends valuable signal.

I thought I sufficiently covered my position on places people live in my top comment, but to reiterate: we should help folks move who need help moving, and very aggressively, through policy and financial signals, inhibit folks from moving to where the climate risk is beyond an agreed upon collective risk appetite (which sets policy, financial signal, etc). This will make folks sad, but to not will make them more sad when the risk exposure is realized.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/insurance

Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by toomuchtodo on Monday October 07, 2024 @03:19PM (#41769885)
Potentially related:

https://www.redfin.com/news/hurricane-helene-impacting-reloc... ("Redfin: Nearly One-Third of Young Adults Say Hurricane Helene Has Made Them Reconsider Where They Want to Live in the Future: Survey")

Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by staticman2 on Monday October 07, 2024 @12:21PM (#41767603)
If you can afford an $80,000 Cybertruck I would expect you can afford to trade it in for a vehicle you can insure.
Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by dgrin91 on Monday October 07, 2024 @12:29PM (#41767710)
This is a pretty fundamentally flawed view. What about life or health insurance? Life insurance high, then what, stop living? Health insurance high, so stop getting sick?

Obviously the finances work such that net-net the insurance companies make more money in the end, but insurance is about individual level risk. Most likely (even hopefully) my insurance payments will be a net-loser, but IF I need it then they can prevent catastrophic financial loss.

Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by toomuchtodo on Monday October 07, 2024 @12:32PM (#41767761)
I believe health insurance (really, access to healthcare) is a human right. Life insurance can discriminate against you based on your health current state, and some people cannot get life insurance (or the cost is exceptionally exorbitant, because it is properly pricing the risk of loss). I don't believe someone is entitled to live where ever they want, or drive whatever they want, from an insurability perspective. We might just disagree on this philosophically, my apologies in advance.

> but insurance is about individual level risk

Insurance is about pooled risk, avoiding adverse selection, and balancing the risk of loss with whatever the pool criteria and objectives are. We can insure what should be insurance, and we can cut checks to what should just be aid, support, etc. Knowing which is which is important though if we operate under the assumption that resources are finite.

https://www.actuary.org/sites/default/files/pdf/health/pool_...

Re:Geico car insurance may no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks by hn_throwaway_99 on Monday October 07, 2024 @01:37PM (#41768622)
These are bad analogies:

> Life insurance high, then what, stop living?

You seem to confuse what life insurance is for - it's not for the person being insured, it's for their dependents (at least with respect to term life). And it already happens all the time that life insurance gets too expensive, so people forego it. It's one reason that financial planners recommend getting life insurance when you're young, when you're healthier and it's cheaper. Also, as you age it becomes less likely that you'll have dependents that need you to have life insurance.

As others have pointed out, the debate over health insurance shouldn't confuse the debate over other types of insurance. Many societies have accepted the viewpoint that everyone should have health insurance as a fundamental right, even if they have a horrible risk profile and it's uneconomic. I don't think anyone can make that argument about someone's "right" to drive a car that is inherently dangerous to other road users and horribly expensive to repair.