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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   39213 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.

What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.

Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.

This is why I always get the bare minimum insurance legally possible. Self-insuring is much simpler; I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly. If their insurance covers me when they total my car, great; if not, or if I am the one that crashes my car, I'll just have to buy another car. It helps that I have never owned a new or expensive car; all my cars have been 10+ years old and worth only a few thousands of dollars on the used market.

But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.

Similarly, when my job offered me a bunch of different health insurance tiers, I deliberately picked the ones that would deduct the least from my paycheck, on the idea that I probably wouldn't be able to navigate the insurance bureaucracy anyway (I was right; my contract was not renewed, and I barely got a couple of primary visits before my benefits lapsed). I am aware of my own limitations and deliberately try to opt out of interacting with complicated systems whenever possible.

Which is also one of the reasons I have a prepaid phone instead of a monthly phone contract. It's so simple; account balance is near zero or time is expiring means I need to buy another card, same as I buy gas when the tank is empty. What could be simpler than that?

I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly.

Even that little insurance shouldn’t be necessary. If I crash into your brand new Porsche, me or my insurance should only have to repay you the price of a used kia – else you owning expensive shit is an externality I have to pay for.

How far does this logic extend? Does you accidentally burning down my """needlessly""" expensive home count as me owning expensive things as an externality foisted onto you? The existence of any other not-minimum-viable-product that I own?

It costs me 350 euros per year to insure other people’s cars, but only 35 euros per year to insure their houses and everything else. So the likelihood of me destroying their house is multiple orders of magnitude lower.

But strictly speaking, yes, any accidental destruction should only be compensated at used discount prices. If you have a working class friend and you let him borrow your luxury watch and he loses it you can’t expect him to repay you full price. But again, insuring this is cheap so I’m not going to die on that hill and claim classist oppression on the basis of 35 euros.

People don't typically burn down other people's houses, accidentally or otherwise. People DO get into car accidents every few years. There's a difference.

Sure. But as a matter of principle, if someone ruins my expensive stuff, should they make me whole or instead give me the minimum viable product as recompense?

I would really prefer to be made whole and am unsympathetic to arguments about me having expensive things being a negative externality on everyone else.

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