From the Capitalism Can't Do The Job Files: Insurance companies are buggering out

One of the major impacts of climate change that is starting to be felt is insurance that has either become too expensive to buy, or not available at all. In Florida, homeowners are increasingly unable to get insurance at any cost. Now, a major hit has come in California. The NYT writes:

Climate Shocks Are Making Parts of America Uninsurable. It Just Got Worse.

The largest insurer in California said it would stop offering new coverage. It’s part of a broader trend of companies pulling back from dangerous areas.

The climate crisis is becoming a financial crisis.

This month, the largest homeowner insurance company in California, State Farm, announced that it would stop selling coverage to homeowners. That’s not just in wildfire zones, but everywhere in the state.

Insurance companies, tired of losing money, are raising rates, restricting coverage or pulling out of some areas altogether — making it more expensive for people to live in their homes.

“Risk has a price,” said Roy Wright, the former official in charge of insurance at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and now head of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a research group. “We’re just now seeing it.”

In parts of eastern Kentucky ravaged by storms last summer, the price of flood insurance is set to quadruple. In Louisiana, the top insurance official says the market is in crisis, and is offering millions of dollars in subsidies to try to draw insurers to the state.  

And in much of Florida, homeowners are increasingly struggling to buy storm coverage. Most big insurers have pulled out of the state already, sending homeowners to smaller private companies that are straining to stay in business — a possible glimpse into California’s future if more big insurers leave.

State Farm, which insures more homeowners in California than any other company, said it would stop accepting applications for most types of new insurance policies in the state because of “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.”

The company said that while it recognized the work of California officials to reduce losses from wildfires, it had to stop writing new policies “to improve the company’s financial strength.” A State Farm spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.  

Florida, despite its challenges, has an important advantage: A steady influx of residents who remain, for now, willing and able to pay the rising cost of living there. In Louisiana, the rising cost of insurance has become, for some communities, a threat to their existence.

Like Florida after Andrew, Louisiana’s insurance market started to buckle after insurers began leaving following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Then, starting with Hurricane Laura in 2020, a series of storms pummeled the state. Nine insurance companies failed; people began rushing into the state’s own version of Florida’s Citizens plan.

California wildfire in 2021

Hm. A big for-profit insurance company calls climate change impacts a source of rapidly growing catastrophe exposure. What does the radical right Republican Party call it? Alarmism. A hoax. A joke. God's plan. The weather. Weaponization of the weather. Socialism. Evil lies. Etc.

There are just some things that capitalism cannot or refuses to do well due to the moral profit imperative. Things that come to mind are insurance, professional journalism, health care delivery, water, gas and electric utilities and major infrastructure including the internet. In those areas, capitalism sucks and we get the shaft.

If capitalism cannot or will not do the job, what is left? Socialization of the job by the federal or state governments is one option. Another option, the current Plan A, is to just let people go pound sand when they cannot insure their homes or drop dead when they cannot afford health care. Capitalism just doesn't care about those things.

How Christian nationalism sees climate change:

A socialist Democratic Party hoax! 

Thoughts about reasonable compromise: Analyzing tyranny vs. democracy in laws

CONTEXT

My political ideology is based on a few core moral principles, namely (1) fidelity to, or reasonable respect for, facts, true truths and sound reasoning, even when they are inconvenient, (2) politics and government should be in service to the public interest (a concept unavoidably loaded with essentially contested concepts), and (3) reasonable compromise as a bulwark against authoritarianism, i.e., secular tyranny and/or religious theocracy. The main goal is fostering a mindset focused on defense of democracy, a stable, sustainable and reasonably rational balance of power between the people and special interests. 

Reasonable compromise is a tricky concept, much more complicated than appears on the surface.

About reasonable compromise

A NYT article this morning triggered thinking about reasonable compromise in democracy. The NYT article:

House Set to Vote on Debt Limit Bill Amid Republican Resistance

Speaker Kevin McCarthy was working to cobble together the votes to push through the compromise he struck with President Biden, as lawmakers in both parties signaled their displeasure with the plan

Reasonable compromise arguably is an essentially contested concept. At least some of the elites on the two sides of the debt deal are unhappy. Some of them probably won't vote to support it in congress. Some of the public is also unhappy with the deal. Many elites and rank and file just don't see reasonable compromise in it.

So, what is reasonable here? If there was no deal, the US would default on its debt and major chaos and serious social pain would likely ensue. Maybe actual catastrophe and many deaths would ensue. In terms of what is politically possible and necessary to avoid default, some kind of deal needs to get passed by congress and signed by the president. Period.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, one could probably argue that any deal is reasonable, even if there is no compromise in it, with one side or the other getting everything they wanted. In this deal, both sides got some of what they wanted. Therefore, it is a compromise that has a chance of passing congress and being signed into law.

But, what if the radical right agenda in this is a relentless march toward some form of secular and religious tyranny? Each step toward tyranny is a win for the pro-tyranny forces and a loss for the pro-democracy forces. Each time the tyranny forces have enough power and win, they will inch closer to their ultimate goal. Wins for tyrant wannabes can include laws built on compromise.

By contrast, the pro-democracy forces are fighting to defend democracy. By definition, political and social power in a democracy are distributed and thus mixed in with (i) members of the public who, knowingly or not, actively support the tyranny forces, and (ii) people who don't participate. With tyranny, power is much more concentrated and focused with elites than with average people. Their goals are more power and wealth. The goals of pro-democracy forces are much more fragmented and complex.

Is the debt deal mostly pro-tyranny, mostly pro-democracy 

or an ambiguous mix of both? 

Some of what the radical right authoritarians got is definitely anti-democracy. Specifically the elimination of about $22 billion of $80 billion marked for the IRS to improve tax compliance is anti-democracy. The Republicans want to protect wealthy tax cheats. Those tax cheats have bought Republican Party protection through our corrupt pay-to-play political system. Corruption is inherently anti-democracy. Corruption tends to concentrate power and wealth with the elites. Although the radical right vehemently denies it, there is no rational way to deny any of that.

The deal also includes amendments to the National Environmental Policy Act to streamline permitting for energy projects. House Republicans claim this the first significant reforms to NEPA since 1982. It has been a cherished, decades-long goal of radical right ideologues and the business community to gut environmental regulations. Those special interests and vested elites want freedom to pollute and profit from it. This provision of the deal probably moves toward that goal. This mostly benefits special interests and the elites who profit, although elites deny it, pointing to jobs or whatever else that might be plausible. If one believes that trashing the environment mostly for the benefit of special interests and vested elites is inherently unstable, then this too might be more pro-tyranny than pro-democracy. The balance of energy impacts between polluting carbon and green energy is not clear, so impacts of this is hard to read.

The provisions that the Democrats got deal mostly with limiting proposed Republican cuts to social domestic spending. In terms of defending democracy, that is mostly neutral. Maybe it is pro-democracy if the amounts of limited spending are actually big enough to make much of a difference in the overall federal debt. Neither side wants to cut the gigantic US military budget, which amounts to $886 billion in the current debt deal. That is anti-democracy because it favors unsustainable fiscal policy.

On balance, it appears that the debt deal is moderately more pro-tyranny than pro-democracy. If one believes that is true, then is this a reasonable compromise? It is a pragmatic compromise if it is the only deal that can pass and get signed into law. But is it reasonable?

Qs: In view of the relentless, grave threat to American democracy the pro-tyranny radical right poses, is it time for significant new and existing laws to be analyzed for their pro-tyranny and pro-democracy content or impacts?

Or, would analyzing laws for their democracy content be a counterproductive exercise because too many essentially contested concepts are present in most or all significant laws for a meaningful analysis of power and wealth flows to be reasonably estimated?[1]

Footnote: 

1. For context, political power flow has been studied and estimated. Presumably the same thing can done for individual laws or clusters of related or overlapping laws. The chart below shows political power. It was made in 1880 and shows about 100 years of American political history. 

Your favorite First Lady

 I recently got into a debate on another forum about which First Lady had been the bestest. Believe it or not, some (and you can guess their demographic) argued it was Melania but definitely not Michelle.

Sad but true.

That aside, many polls have shown that Eleanor was the most popular and bestest. Some liked Jackie or go back further and have selected Lady Bird. 

https://elections-daily.com/2022/09/21/ranking-the-first-ladies/

So, for a change of pace on here, list your faves. Michelle is mine. I admired Laura as well. Ditto for Roselynn. Not crazy about Melania, Hillary, or even Jackie for that matter. Too young to have an opinion about the more historic ladies. 

And I definitely like our current First Lady.

Your turn.

News bits: About inflation: AI experts warn about AI; From Christian nationalism wars

The NYT writes about inflation:

The prices of oil, transportation, food ingredients and other raw materials have fallen in recent months as the shocks stemming from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have faded. Yet many big businesses have continued raising prices at a rapid clip.

Some of the world’s biggest companies have said they do not plan to change course and will continue increasing prices or keep them at elevated levels for the foreseeable future.

That strategy has cushioned corporate profits. And it could keep inflation robust, contributing to the very pressures used to justify surging prices.  

PepsiCo, the snacks and beverage maker, has become a prime example of how large corporations have countered increased costs, and then some.

Hugh Johnston, the company’s chief financial officer, said in February that PepsiCo had raised its prices by enough to buffer further cost pressures in 2023. At the end of April, the company reported that it had raised the average price across its products by 16 percent in the first three months of the year. That added to a similar size price increase in the fourth quarter of 2022 and increased its profit margin.

“I don’t think our margins are going to deteriorate at all,” Mr. Johnston said in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV. “In fact, what we’ve said for the year is we’ll be at least even with 2022, and may in fact increase margins during the course of the year.”

The bags of Doritos, cartons of Tropicana orange juice and bottles of Gatorade drinks sold by PepsiCo are now substantially pricier. Customers have grumbled, but they have largely kept buying. Shareholders have cheered. PepsiCo declined to comment [the good 'ole KYMS tactic].  

For much of the past two years, most companies “had a perfectly good excuse to go ahead and raise prices,” said Samuel Rines, an economist and the managing director of Corbu, a research firm that serves hedge funds and other investors. “Everybody knew that the war in Ukraine was inflationary, that grain prices were going up, blah, blah, blah. And they just took advantage of that.”

But those go-to rationales for elevating prices, he added, are now receding [hence the need for the KYMS tactic].

KYMS = keep your mouth shut; a common tactic in politics, commerce and religion to deal (or refuse to deal) with inconvenient facts, true truths and/or sound reasoning 

So when one experiences radical right Republicans ignoring major causes of inflation and instead blaming socialist Democrats, evil Joe Biden and pandemic spending for inflation, one can rest assured that the allegation is standard radical right lies, slanders and irrational nonsense. Corporations know two things for certain about the radical right. One, the radical right in congress will ferociously defend big corporate interests. Two, bad corporate behavior will be ferociously ignored, denied and/or rationalized. After all, corporations bought and paid for those precious defenses. That's just called free speech in action.

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The NYT reports that some prominent experts in artificial intelligence will release a 1-sentence long open letter warning about AI. The warning is short to keep the core message from being diluted with details:

A group of industry leaders is planning to warn on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they are building may one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on par with pandemics and nuclear wars.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement expected to be released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.

The signatories included top executives from three of the leading A.I. companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.

Well, now that we have been properly warned everything will be just fine. Or maybe not. We all know how this is going to play out before we get to see if AI will make us go extinct or not.

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Tales from the brutal land of cynical Christian nationalism (CN): The WaPo writes about some brave parents who decided to send their child to public school. This illustrates how years of vicious, slandering CN propaganda has cynically trapped, deceived and betrayed tens of millions of American adults. It takes guts to break away from a cult. Breaking away can come with some very high costs. The WaPo writes:

Aaron and Christina Beall had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.

At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.

Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.

Aaron and Christina Beall pose with their daughter, Aimee, then 6, 

on her first day at Round Hill Elementary School in VA on Aug. 26, 2021

Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis. 

“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.”

Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.

And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry.  

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA [Home School Legal Defense Association] founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.  

Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.

Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift.  

“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse. ... At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.” — Christina Beall

This raises some serious questions. Who is being indoctrinated or brain washed here? Children brought up under lies, intolerance and hate-filled CN "education", or children who go to secular public schools? Exactly what are the lies and subversion tactics of Christian families that CN elites tell the rank and file comes from public schools? 

Presumably, the hated secular lies and subversion tactics prominently include (i) being woke, (ii) acknowledging and tolerating non-heterosexuality and secularism generally, and (iii) the unpleasant aspects of actual American history, instead of the false, comforting narratives that White CN elites falsely assert are historical facts and truths. On thing that cannot be a guiding biblical principle is thou shalt not lie. CN dogma and narratives are loaded with lies and slanders.

Qs: Is it reasonable to argue that, compared to standard public school curricula, CN dogma, lies and slanders is the main source of damaging indoctrination of false beliefs and bigoted intolerance? 

Exactly what are the biblical principles that the CN movement want to impose by social coercion and force of law on American politics and society? 

Is it reasonable to feel seriously threatened, insulted and/or disrespected at the aggressive attitude that theocratic CN has for secular public education and people who want to live secular lives free of Christian coercion, bigotry, oppression and biblical principles, e.g., in the form of Christian nationalist forced birth laws and tax subsidies (worth tens of billions of dollars each year) for politically aggressive anti-democratic Christian theocracy that everyone supports? 

Channel note: Book review not yet done

I'm working my way through the 2023 book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face Of Tyranny In The 21st Century. This one hits much harder home about modern tyranny and mass murder than anything I have seen so far. This analysis of tyranny supersedes even the great master analyst of mass scale slaughter and cruelty described in Hannah Arendt's 1951 masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism (chapter review here). Arendt did not, and could not, see what is happening right now. She wrote in the 1950s. Spin Dictators is a 2023 analysis about a mostly unrecognized form of dictatorship, which has existed for millennia.

I've written about Arendt's observations about unspeakably brutal mass slaughter of humans by humans. The closest thing I am aware of to Arendt is the incredibly sad masterpiece by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Spin Dictators sees reality as beyond modern mass slaughter replaced replaced by mass deception with far fewer corpses and far more popular support. I need a day or two to finish and write a review.

Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 as 

a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine

I'm all jazzed about Spin Dictators because it opens a line of data and reasoning that is new to me about (i) the human condition and modern mass politics, and (ii) the grave danger to American secular democracy.

Hannah Arendt

Nazi Survivor (1906 – 1975) 

historian and political philosopher

News bits: Artificial intelligence software reads images in brain scans; About inflation; Etc.

Vice writes about AI generated images based on fMRI brain scans:

AI Reconstructs 'High-Quality' Video Directly from Brain Readings in Study

Researchers Jiaxin Qing, Zijiao Chen, and Juan Helen Zhou from the National University of Singapore and The Chinese University of Hong Kong used fMRI data and the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion to create a model called MinD-Video that generates video from the brain readings. Their paper describing the work was posted to the arXiv preprint server last week.


Their demonstration on the paper’s corresponding website shows a parallel between videos that were shown to subjects and the AI-generated videos created based on their brain activity. The differences between the two videos are slight and for the most part, contain similar subjects and color palettes.

MinD-Video is defined by the researchers as a “two-module pipeline designed to bridge the gap between image and video brain decoding.” To train the system, the researchers used a publicly available dataset containing videos and fMRI brain readings from test subjects who watched them. The "two-module pipeline" comprised a trained fMRI encoder and a fine-tuned version of Stable Diffusion, a widely-used image generation AI model.

Specifically, they said that these results illuminated three major findings. One is the dominance of the visual cortex, revealing that this part of the brain is a major component of visual perception. Another is that the fMRI encoder operates in a hierarchical fashion, which begins with structural information and then shifts to more abstract and visual features on deeper layers. Finally, the authors found that the fMRI encoder evolved through each learning stage, showing its ability to take on more nuanced information as it continues its training.

This study represents another advancement in the field of, essentially, reading people's minds using AI. Previously, researchers at Osaka University found that they could reconstruct high-resolution images from brain activity with a technique that also used fMRI data and Stable Diffusion.

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A NYT opinion focuses an effect on inflation that huge retailer corporations like Walmart indirectly cause. Economists call this phenomenon the water bed effect. The NYT opines:

To understand why grocery prices are way up, we need to look past the headlines about inflation and reconsider long-held ideas about the benefits of corporate bigness.

Like other independent grocers, Food Fresh buys through large national wholesalers that purchase goods by the truckload, achieving the same volume efficiencies the big chains do. What accounts for the difference in price is not efficiency but raw market power. Major grocery suppliers, including Kraft Heinz, General Mills and Clorox, rely on Walmart for more than 20 percent of their sales. So when Walmart demands special deals, suppliers can’t say no. And as suppliers cut special deals for Walmart and other large chains, they make up for the lost revenue by charging smaller retailers even more, something economists refer to as the water bed effect.

This isn’t competition. It’s big retailers exploiting their financial control over suppliers to hobble smaller competitors. Our failure to put a stop to it has warped our entire food system. It has driven independent grocers out of business and created food deserts. It has spurred consolidation among food processors, which has slashed the share of food dollars going to farmers and created dangerous bottlenecks in the production of meat and other essentials. And in a perverse twist, it has raised food prices for everyone, no matter where you shop.   

A level playing field was long a tenet of U.S. antitrust policy. In the 19th century, Congress barred railroads from favoring some shippers over others. It applied this principle to retailing in 1936 with the Robinson-Patman Act, which mandates that suppliers offer the same terms to all retailers. The act allows large retailers to claim discounts based on actual volume efficiencies but blocks them from extracting deals that aren’t also made available to their competitors.

Independent grocery stores flourished, accounting for more than half of food sales in 1958. Supermarket chains like Safeway and Kroger also thrived. This dynamism fed a broad prosperity. Even the smallest towns and poorest neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store. And the industry’s diffuse structure ensured that its fruits were widely distributed. Of the nearly nine million people working in retailing overall in the mid-1950s, nearly two million owned or co-owned the store where they worked. There were more Black-owned grocery stores in 1969 than there are today.

Then, amid the economic chaos and inflation of the late 1970s, the law fell into disfavor with regulators, who had come to believe that allowing large retailers to flex more muscle over suppliers would lower consumer prices. For the most part, the law hasn’t been enforced since. As a top Reagan administration official explained in 1981, antitrust was no longer “concerned with fairness to smaller competitors.”

Once again, we see adverse anti-consumer effects of aggressive brass knuckles capitalist ideology. It explicitly favors big businesses over smaller ones. That ideology is one of the two dominant ideologies in the Republican Party. The same ideology is a non-trivial influence in the mostly neoliberal Democratic Party.

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From the Lost Cause Files: Lawfare writes:

Domestic terrorism charges were absent from the charges brought against those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—not because they don’t apply but because they simply don’t exist. In the days that followed the attack, the Congressional Research Service neatly captured the complicated question of how to define the incident and the individuals involved, noting that “an individual may commit criminal acts that are widely considered domestic terrorism and be prosecuted for the criminal acts themselves, but an individual cannot be charged with committing an act of domestic terrorism under current federal law.”  

Although the U.S. Code defines “domestic terrorism” using language laid out in the 2001 Patriot Act, the entry does not carry a criminal penalty, meaning individuals cannot be charged for such acts at the federal level. In rare cases, federal prosecutors are able to request a terrorism enhancement on top of existing convictions, which can lengthen sentences.

Talk about Lost Causes, this is definitely one of 'em. The fascist Republican Party still officially refers to the 1/6 coup attempt as legitimate political discourse. There is roughly a snowball's chance in Hell of any meaningful domestic terrorism law being passed over vehement Republican Party opposition. The GOP has already blocked at least one domestic terrorism bill according to CNN: 

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a bill designed to combat domestic terrorism from advancing in a key vote. The vote comes as lawmakers are under intense pressure to take action in the wake of multiple recent episodes of horrific gun violence.

At CPAC in Aug. 2022, the radicalized GOP explicitly

acknowledged it is a domestic terrorist organization