Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Car Insurance Is Too Cheap

I've recently started listening to the podcast The War on Cars, which is generally excellent.

Its most recent episode is called "Car Insurance Is Too Cheap." It's largely based on an article in The Economist of a similar title. This should be an embed of the podcast (but if that doesn't work, here's a direct link):

Daniel Knowles, who wrote The Economist article, is in the podcast, and says he started wondering about insurance when he would rent cars and face the question about buying insurance with the car rental. The companies would always ask him, "What if you damage the car?" but never, "What if you hit a person?" 

The podcast delves into the various levels of liability insurance required in states around the U.S., which range from a minimum of nonexistent to a maximum of not enough for the reality of damage to human beings. And, as anyone would expect, many drivers buy the absolute minimum insurance possible to keep the cost of driving down. In 29% of states, the minimum insurance doesn't even cover the cost of damage to the car being driven, let alone the other kinds of damage drivers can do.

On top of that larger problem, a more specific problem with insurance is identified in the podcast and in Knowles's article. 

Let's say you're injured by a driver when you're a pedestrian or bike rider, and your health insurance company gets reimbursed by the driver's insurance for your medical expenses. Even though you've paid your health insurance premiums, your insurance company got reimbursed for your costs by the driver's insurance, and from that point on, your insurer has the right to also claim the liability money from the driver's insurance company (if the driver has liability insurance). It's called "subrogation." Subrogation means you no longer have a claim against the driver's insurance for anything.

The case in this episode of The War on Cars is about a Portland couple whose toddler was killed when he and his dad were hit in a crosswalk. The driver was 100% at fault. Yet the parents got nothing from the driver's insurance afterward: not a dollar to make up for lost time at work, or money to help bury their child. As the mom put it,

Why do we have insurance? They're just insuring other insurance companies. They're not insuring people, or victims, or families. 

Knowles is quoted saying, "Crash victims subsidize lower insurance rates with their own life and limb." It's a classic collective action problem. 

Stats are given in the podcast on the scale of the problem of crashes. The dollar amounts are less meaningful than their magnitude as a part of the U.S. GDP. In 2019, the straight cost of crashes (including medical costs, lost productivity, legal and court costs, emergency service costs, insurance administration costs, congestion costs, property damage, and workplace losses) was 1.5% of GDP. When loss of quality of life is added in (which seems like a reasonable thing to do), the number increases to 5% of GDP. 

That's per year.

And as the podcast reminds us, 2019 was before the increase in crashes that has happened since the pandemic, as well as the increase in costs for cars and other goods. So those percentages are low, if anything. 

At the end of the podcast, Knowles points out that cars are the only thing in society that regular people are required to insure in order to operate, and that it's because they are so dangerous. (I couldn't help thinking of the arguments that are made comparing guns and cars, and how insurance should be required of gun owners. Well, yes. See?) 

We (the collective "we") can't see that because we are all immersed in the way things are, which has been called motornormativity, or even being car-brained. 

But this situation is not inevitable — it's barely 100 years old. It can be changed (somehow!). 

___

Minnesota is a no-fault states of the type mentioned in the podcast. That means that if a pedestrian or bike rider is hit, their auto insurance is on the hook for health insurance costs even if the driver is at fault, since there is "no fault." However, if one driver is at fault when hitting another driver, and there's damage to the car, then it matters! An op-ed from 1996 (on page 5 of this pdf) shows how absurd the situation is.

(What happens if a pedestrian or bike rider doesn't have auto insurance? I don't know specifically, but probably the state has a pool to cover that eventuality. But it certainly makes you feel like a second class citizen along the way.)


Tuesday, March 26, 2024

One Thing After Another

I woke up to news on Twitter of the Key bridge collapse in Baltimore. For a split second, I thought I should make sure the video wasn't fake, since I hadn't seen it mentioned on BlueSky, which I always check first. 

But that's the nature of posts on BlueSky — my feed lags on news. Unfortunately, it was clearly true. 

I won't promote the conspiracy theories and racist responses, which followed almost immediately, by mentioning their specifics. But whew...what a country we live in. 

Okay, one post. This is from a BlueSky account called Low Quality Facts, in early afternoon:

Things I learned this morning:

-The bridge is woke.
-The ship that crashed into the bridge is woke.
-It was a Russian or Chinese cyber attack.
-But it was also a false flag.
-Yesterday's legal experts are now structural engineers.
-It will take between one day and ten years to build a new bridge.

Meanwhile, it was snowing, then raining, then snowing here. (We've just gotten more snow than during the rest of winter 2023–24.) NBC is not hiring Ronna McDaniel after all. And it appears the Supreme Court will not decide the Mifepristone case by granting standing to some strange subset of doctors who want to think of pregnant women as manatees.

What a day.


Monday, March 25, 2024

Rise Up

The sarcasm of today's "You Don't Say" from L.K. Hanson on the Monday Star Tribune op-ed page was inspirational:

I've never heard of Nellie McClung before today. Yes, I'm a Canada-ignorant American.

It sounds as though she didn't spend much time sitting around being resigned, writing 16 books, helping women get the right to vote and hold the highest public offices in Canada, holding public office herself, and serving on the board of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She died in 1951 at the age of 77.

Like many white feminists of her era, McClung was also a eugenicist who advocated sterilization of "mental defectives" and First Nations women. I acknowledge that about her, and reject it.



Sunday, March 24, 2024

Death in a Parking Lot

Late in my teenage years in early 1980, a long-time family friend was killed by a driver in a mall parking lot.

She was a short, wiry 81-year-old woman named Clara Reger who was almost a third grandmother to my family. She was a ham radio operator, and probably one of the best-known women hams in the country. She was also a pianist who had played in silent movie theaters. She was a swimmer who taught me how to float on my back. She gave me Evening in Paris perfume one year when I was a kid, for some reason. I kept that little blue bottle for a really long time, though I never used the perfume.

Clara was a widow whose husband, I knew, had died from an aspirin overdose, or maybe an allergic reaction, years earlier. She lived in Buffalo, where we visited her, right next to the old Bills stadium.

I knew that she was active in the regional networks of radio operators, passing traffic, which was part of maintaining U.S. civil defense. I didn't know the specifics of the work she had done for that effort during World War II until after she died, or that in later years she worked with severely injured people to get their radio licenses, making adaptations possible for them to send and receive Morse Code.

In addition to working with handicapped ham radio operators, at the time she died she was still running courses to teach young people Morse Code and judging New York's state competitions for best receiving. She was still the official American Red Cross amateur station for Buffalo.

The insurance company of the driver who killed her tried to decrease its liability by saying that her "useful and productive life" was over. Clara's granddaughter gathered evidence that such was not the case. I don't know what came of it, but I hope she was able to prove it was not true.

I thought of all this today when I saw this from David Zipper on BlueSky. An 80-year-old Canadian woman was killed by the driver of a pickup truck in a Walmart parking lot:

The truck that killed Clara was probably not nearly so oversized, but Clara was also less than 5' tall, so it may have been similar in its effect on her body. The driver in Clara's case claimed he was blinded by the sun, and that he was only going 5 or 10 miles per hour.

Zipper concludes with this: 

In the US, the federal government doesn't count crashes that happen on private property like parking lots (where big cars are deadly).

That omission leads to an undercounting of pedestrian deaths, which are at a 40-yr high (even with incomplete data).

Here is the chart of U.S. pedestrian fatalities since 1980:

The 2010 inflection point is when smart phones had become ubiquitous and about when SUVs and pickup trucks began their march toward greater size, front-end height, and increasing prevalence.

As Zipper says, all of those numbers omit privately owned spaces like parking lots, and as most of us know from personal experience, there can be many conflict points between drivers and pedestrians in parking lots. The fact that there is no data on that is highly disturbing. 

 


Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Great Transition

I've read about 700 pages of The Power Broker and I felt like I needed a fiction break, so I've been tearing through a bunch of books in the past week or so, mostly recent science fiction.

One book was The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins. It's part of the climate fiction subgenre, and within that the sub-subgenre where things are working out pretty well. (I look for those kinds of books, like Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden, Cory Doctorow's recent The Lost Cause, and even Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, because I need some inspiration these days.)

Googins's book deals with the political fallout after things have been very much set on the right path. It's an interesting moment, since it seems like the tide has been turned against the effects of climate change (called the Crisis) through the concerted efforts of people, which are described in effective detail. The battle is won! There's even an annual celebration called Day Zero.

But what happens after that? The story is wrapped within a political thriller, but it's really about the perspectives of different people: parents and kids, or two people in a relationship who had different life experiences during the same time period.

We know by the end of the book that Emi, the 15-year-old narrator of many of the chapters, has already interviewed her mother about her horrific experiences growing up, when the book began. But on the first reading, all I knew as a reader on page 22 was that the people of Earth had reached Net Zero more than 15 years earlier and some people felt like it wasn't enough in the face of the Crisis. And that included Emi's mother, Kristina. 

Emi says:

I stare at the ceiling in the darkness and promise myself — if I'm a mom one day — never to make my kid feel guilty for things she can't control. Like being born after the Crisis. Like going to high school instead of saving the world. Like having a room of her own and food whenever she wants it. I promise my future self to remember that if you tell your kid how lucky she is, it never makes her feel lucky. It makes her feel terrible. Like it's her fault for being lucky, and her fault for needing to be told all the time how lucky she is, and how everyone has sacrificed everything so she can continue being so lucky without knowing how lucky she is.

Emi's interviews with her mother — done as part of a class project —are parceled out between the books' chapters. Kristina is not a point of view character, but her voice is in the interviews, describing how her life came to radicalize her. And that was the only thing that could have happened, given how terrible her circumstances were. In describing how her sister died while they were essentially convict-labor forest firefighters, she says,

Look — you see this, Emiliana, how my hands are shaking? It's not because of Yesi. I've done my grieving. It's the people who killed her and destroyed our planet and got away with it. The Leadership Council trots out veterans who grew up in the refugee camps and claim no bitterness. We hear about people from deconstructed towns who lost everything to the Crisis and say it was just one big adventure. As if forgiveness is some godly virtue. Forgiveness is not a virtue. It's cowardice. A way to avoid the unpleasantness of justice. People should be outaged. (page 171, emphasis in the original)

Emi's father, who has his own share of trauma, almost gives up early in the worst years of the Crisis but takes on the slow process of just helping however he can. 

In the years after Emi is born, he and Kristina begin to drift apart in their perspective on the status of the post-Day Zero Crisis without talking about it. Is the revolution over, or does it continue?

The Great Transition doesn't answer that question, but it puts a spotlight on one family's relationships within the struggle in a way that reminded me of an episode of This American Life called The End of the World As We Know It: what happens when one family goes all in on fighting climate change, which I've been meaning to write about here since it aired in fall 2021.


Friday, March 22, 2024

Quantity Over Quality

I read through this list of things that don't work from substacker dynomight (thanks to Edith Zimmerman on kottke.org), and among many that resonated, found one in particular that really warmed my heart:

Quality over quantity. I often worry that I write too much on this blog. After all, the world has a lot of text. Does it need more? Shouldn’t I pick some small number of essays and really perfect them?

Arguably, no. You’ve perhaps heard of the pottery class where students graded on quantity produced more quality than those graded on quality. (It was actually a photography class.) For scientists, the best predictor of having a highly cited paper is just writing lots of papers. As I write these words, I have no idea if any of this is good and I try not to think about it.

Sometimes I wonder about scrabbling to post here every day. This endorsement gives me strength to go on.


Thursday, March 21, 2024

Kitsch of the Ultra Wealthy

I didn't notice that a Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership award was created back in 2020. I don't remember hearing who it was awarded to in the years since then, or that it was funded by the Opperman Foundation.

The Oppermans are a Minnesota name, since their company, West Publishing (creator of Westlaw), was based in Saint Paul. Vance Opperman, son of founder Dwight Opperman, is a name I know as a big-money DFL donor. These days, he's part of the very centrist wing of the DFL in Minneapolis that tries to stop what I consider to be changes needed in the midst of our multi-crises.

Be that as it may, he's still a Democrat. I don't know about his father. But I do know about RBG, as do we all.

Well, this year Opperman's stepmother, Julie, who appears to run the foundation, decided to expand the award to include men. Which could be a reasonable thing to do. Sure, there are men whose work is in keeping with RBG's legacy. I could get behind that.

However, it's a little odd to go from giving one award per year to a woman to now giving five awards, with four out of the five of them going to men.

The biggest problem, however, is that two of the men are people who it seems 100% likely RBG would disavow completely: Rupert Murdoch and the Elon Musk of 2024.

Two of the other three people named are convicted felons: Michael Milken and Martha Stewart.

Altogether, that's quite a group, when Sylvester Stallone is the only one of the five who might pass the smell test. I don't know what Stallone has done to advance equality for women, but maybe he's done something.

Here's a gift link to the Washington Post story about the Opperman Foundation canceling the awards. The Library of Congress, which was to have been the venue for the gala event, even felt the need to issue a statement saying it was not associated with it; it was just a hired space.

In the foundation's statement about canceling the awards, the writer made it clear that they were using the awards to honor "iconic" people (not, as I would have thought, people who advanced women's equality or women's leadership).

More notoriety for iconic people: that is surely what we need in this society.

This post didn't fit into my usual categories very well, but then I realized that these types of awards and the expensive galas where rich people get together to congratulate each other are just another type of kitsch. So that was its label. 

I don't think this is the way to honor RBG's work and unless the award and its process is completely changed, it should stay canceled.


Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Frugal Fruitful Fruit

Today I learned (thanks to Build Soil) that the word frugal derives from the same root as the word fruit, which didn't surprise me that much. 

What I did find a bit more amusing was that the fruit-related word at the common root was not a noun but a verb (meaning to fruit, to produce), deriving from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhrug-.

Build Soil was, of course, citing the handy website etymonline, which says *bhrug meant "to enjoy" and "had derivatives referring to agricultural products." 


Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Rustin

Two days ago, it was Bayard Rustin's 112th birthday. I've mentioned him quite a few times, with one particular post about him specifically.

I recently watched the Netflix film Rustin, starring Colman Domingo. If you haven't heard about, or haven't had a chance to watch it, I recommend it.

It's good to watch a movie about real people who managed, despite tremendous opposition, to accomplish great things.


Monday, March 18, 2024

Not the Place to Move

U.S. population shifts over the past several decades have been recorded by the Census. Here are a couple of maps that show two versions, one a snapshot between the two most recent censuses, and one combining most of two census time periods:

2010–2019

2000–2018

I had just seen a map like this and was thinking about the growth of population in Idaho, with its 14% growth in the 2010s and 36% growth from 2000–2018, when I saw this story about the loss of obstetric care-givers in that state

The gist is that 22% of practicing OB-GYNs have left Idaho since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, including 55% of the high-risk practitioners. There are only five high-risk practitioners left in the state. Five.

After all that population growth, Idaho had just shy of 2 million people in 2023. According to the Census, about half of those people are female, and they don't all appear to be beyond child-bearing years.

This seems very bad.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

People's Graphic Design Archive

Have I shared before about the People's Graphic Design Archive?

No? Well, now I have.

It's a place to constantly check because it's always changing as people upload work from all time periods and places.

Here's one sample:


Saturday, March 16, 2024

Charles Hamilton

Back in late February I missed posting about the announced death of Charles V. Hamilton, a Columbia University professor who died in November 2023. His obituary from the New York Times ran in the Star Tribune, but this Washington Post article is more complete than what I saw (gift link).

I had never heard of Hamilton until I saw the obituary in the Star Tribune, but it's clear he and his work were everywhere at key points. He popularized the phrases Black Power and institutional racism and provided intellectual gravitas to the movement associated with Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael).

I know it's naive, but it always amazes me to find out about a person who played a major role in spreading ideas I've known about for a long time, but I've never heard of him. Where was the short-coming — in me, my education, or in active suppression? I know I'm a bit too young to have read the material he wrote on these subjects as it was coming out, but it surprises me that I never came across his name and bio before now.