There are limits, but we can do much better than we do now, in the US anyway.

Absolutely: Points taken, and I am aware of them.

I didn’t mean to imply that everyone doing the silly thing was rich (just people with enough money), nor did I mean to imply that every “natural disaster” was something that anyone could account for by not building, well, anywhere. But there are places well-known to suffer destruction on a regular basis, and I don’t think anyone should have to help subsidize insurance in these situations, given the type of structures built.

To clarify by way of example, a structure on property at risk of being hit by forest fires once in a hundred years or so is just a normal risk that should be covered. This is what insurance is, in fact, for. My extreme opposite example would be the people who choose to build somewhere that floods or is hit by hurricanes with regularity. Or somewhere that that the land must be continuously and artificially engineered in a (doomed to fail as usual) attempt to protect property. This involves high monetary costs not borne by the recipients of these measures, and high environmental costs as well. If your home has been destroyed by a hurricane three times in the last 20 years, you are either a) building the wrong type of structure, or b) building somewhere no one should build.

It isn’t just a personal choice problem, but a cultural and regulatory issue as well. Also a matter of developers knowing that, for instance, the geology of a hill is unsound but weasels its way into building homes there anyway. In that case, property owners wouldn’t even know there was a problem, but it is very likely that someone did, and lied.

In some places, if you want to live there, you should either build an essentially throw-away structure that contains no parts that become missiles in high winds, or build the equivalent of a brick outhouse on stilts or whatever.

In CA, you CAN’T get earthquake insurance, unless you buy an expensive premium, and even THAT premium will have you paying $50-100,000 deductible BEFORE the insurance kicks in.

I wonder what she would say if her carelessness kills someone she loves. Some people don’t realize that the worse thing that can happen is for YOU to die. It is even worse if you cause someone ELSE you love to die. People just don’t get that part.

If we want to keep building the wrong sorts of houses in stupid places, yeah, its our fault. If you want to live on the coast and think that beach and or cliff is forever, you’re stupid. (Beach nourishment, for example, is stupid, pointless, destructive, and wasteful.) And if you want anyone else to be paying for your stupid, I’ll have to disagree.

I just want to add a bit of nuance to this. I live and own property in Northern L.A., so I know a lot about living in a place where there is extreme fire hazard nearly 8 months out of the year as well as earthquake hazard and the fun mudslides as well. . .

I agree with you to a certain point. There are neighborhoods out here that are built in high danger places. Some of them exist because rich people want nice houses that overlook the ocean cliffs or are tucked away from prying eyes. And they buy these places knowing full well of the risks and sometimes I think to myself, look at the dummy who built next to the National forest and had his house burn down. But it really isn’t that simple.

I almost bought into a housing development in Sylmar because I needed a place to live, and it was cheap. Sylmar is the very north end of the city of L.A. Just north of it are lots of beautiful hills and state forest. People don’t live there because they want to live next to nature and court danger. They live there because they can’t afford to live deeper into the city. And in L.A., the city is always running into forest at its boundaries (except when it runs into other cities). A few years back, that community I almost bought into burned down. The hillside behind it caught fire and there was no chance to save it. Again, these weren’t rich people living next to nature because they wanted to “get away.” These were lower middle class people who were trying to live as close as possible to their jobs, but were relegated to the very ends of the city, where it brushes up against nature. They typically have long (hour +)commutes to work and can’t afford the apartments/rentals that are out of danger of wild fires.

Oh, and all of them pay a premium on their insurance to live there. In California, if you live in a high earthquake zone, you pay more. If you live in an area prone to wild fires, you pay significantly more. If you build on cliff-sides that may fall down, you pay a lot more. The way it’s supposed to work is that by them paying more, then when disaster does strike, people living in the safer areas don’t have their premiums go up. And you know what, they don’t. Nearly every other year some community within 10 miles of me burns down. It’s hard to get away from forest fires in So. Cal. But my fire insurance has not gone up since I bought my place 5 years ago.

This is not to say that there aren’t idiots who build houses in places that severely tempt fate. I agree that beach front property in Nags Head is certainly going to be destroyed on a regular basis. But many times people end up living in higher risk areas because they don’t have the means to live in lower risk areas.

Anyway, this is dragging on long enough. Just don’t get mad at all the people who live in high fire danger areas or tornado alley. A lot of them don’t have much choice.

…on account of being on immunosuppressants and all…

In the real world this is never true, of course, which is why we must continue to have government. At the very least of its power, government is there to keep honest people honest. (It’s also there to punish those who cheat – which is why the OWS protesters, and many of the rest of us, are so pissed right now.)

Those people who live in California, whose houses are burning down in the brush fires, moved to those hills knowing full well what would happen. The rest of us should not have our insurance rates go up just because they are stupid.

If we want to keep building the wrong sorts of houses in stupid places, yeah, its our fault. If you want to live on the coast and think that beach and or cliff is forever, you’re stupid. (Beach nourishment, for example, is stupid, pointless, destructive, and wasteful.) And if you want anyone else to be paying for your stupid, I’ll have to disagree. I don’t care what the developers told you, or what the neighbors said, we know better. And most of the things we do to maintain a fictional status quo in these environments is both expensive and bad for the environment. And misleading people to a false sense of security.

If you built or bought a home in a reasonably safe place, or on ground you couldn’t have known was unstable and everyone lied to you about it, and you then were subject to disaster, I have no objection to this. If your family has never had the means to move away from somewhere it is stupid to build, I couldn’t fault anyone for this, either. It’s the idiots with enough money who want to live beautiful but unsound places with whom I take exception. Especially when they go right back and rebuild in the same spot, with the same construction methods.

Right up until the time that it happens to one of them. At which time the notion of a morally just universe collapses in a puff of “What did I do to deserve this?”.

And the answer, as always, is “Nothing.”

The universe is indifferent, but we don’t have to be. We can bring some modicum of moral order – whatever is within our finite power – to a universe of random happenstance by means of how we create our social systems.

It’s really our choice.