ironsoap
Over the past 40 years, Americans have been moving to more disaster-prone regions of the U.S. South and West. “A hurricane cutting the Gulf side of Florida now just encounters way more houses, way more businesses, way more roads, way more infrastructure than it did 40 years ago,” Keys said.
At the same time, climate change has been increasing the frequency and severity of extreme storms and wildfires in those fast-growing regions. Finally, when disaster strikes, inflation and labor shortages have driven up the cost of rebuilding.
All of these factors have made disasters more expensive, and contributed to the rise in premiums. But the biggest factor behind the rise, according to Keys, is the way that climate change is reshaping a fundamental pillar of the insurance industry.
Insurance is built around the assumption that disaster doesn’t strike everyone at the same time. For many types of insurance, that assumption is mostly true — a car insurer, for example, knows that it’s unlikely that every driver will get into a fender bender on the exact same day. But when it comes to home insurance, climate change is causing this assumption to crumble. A major wildfire could easily burn down an entire town, or a hurricane could easily rip the roofs off all the homes in a neighborhood. For this reason, insurance companies in disaster-prone regions end up purchasing their own insurance policies, known as “reinsurance.”
Reinsurance protects regular insurance companies from going bankrupt from a string of major disasters. Since reinsurance companies cover the epicenters of extreme weather, they’ve recently become extremely sensitive to climate risk. Since 2020, premiums for reinsurance have doubled, and will likely continue to rise. In states that experience frequent extreme weather disasters — like Louisiana, Texas, and Florida — insurance companies end up purchasing a lot of expensive reinsurance, and those costs get passed down to customers.
This is the biggest factor behind the recent surge in home insurance premiums, and Keys doesn’t expect it to stop anytime soon. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Jacques de Vaucleroy, the chairman of the major reinsurance firm Swiss Re, said that reinsurance premiums will continue to rise until people stop building in dangerous areas.
Good article, several interesting specifics and a food overview. The last bold is mine.
Another great list.
Practical Engineering is beloved. I used to like Smarter Everyday about the same, but Grady is just so much more consistent and interesting on the infrastructure world.
And Jenny is a geek I can get along with. The Starwars hotel failure was fascinating. Wish there was a bit more economic context, but she's great.
Looking forward to some binges here.
Lots of good ones in there. Thanks!
B1M is great, Mega Projects and others of Simon's channels are good (some better then others). Wendover is amazing, I just wish he out more out, but the production quality is probably to high to increase the rate.
I'll have to check the rest out. :)
He is indeed a great find. His Dubai lights was one I was just thinking about due to another post.
I read this on the 14th or so and did a face palm. Floridaland is for the alligators apparently.
Additionally, the federal government has failed to provide sufficient data to support the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 boosters, or acknowledge previously demonstrated safety concerns associated with COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, including:
- prolonged circulation of mRNA and spike protein in some vaccine recipients,
- increased risk of lower respiratory tract infections, and
- increased risk of autoimmune disease after vaccination.
And my favorite:
- Potential DNA integration from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines pose unique and elevated risk to human health and to the integrity of the human genome, including the risk that DNA integrated into sperm or egg gametes could be passed onto offspring of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients.
Apparently we are at risk of covid immune babies!
Agreed, now the fun part of coming up with a legal basis to do so and convincing regulators.
I don't think this requires an act of congress. I think you might see more consumer advocation on the part of FTC (although it doesn't currently regulate online broadcast), or potentially the CFPB.
Admittedly it's more likely to see the EU do some regulations, but it all depends on the election.
I miss it all the time. I wish Pixels would get off their internal storage racket, or at least give you extremely large options.
While I agree, I have a hard time seeing how people will stop using it until the field changes. Maybe in 10 years it will the the MySpace of the sitcom era, but right now it's still growing. That growth is giving it carte blanche to manipulate the users as it sees fit. Regulation might impact it, but it's still a bit of a Goliath.
- Compared to 2023, YouTube’s user base has grown by 20 million this year, representing a 0.74% increase. From Global media insights
Also the active user base is 2.7 billion people in 2024 from the same source above.
The alternatives are out there, but just not in the same league.
Yt-DLP and it's variation (Seal, YTDLnis, etc.), newpipe and it's variation (Tubular, Newpipe Sponsorblock, etc) already allow you to do this without having to get manual.