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A while back when Florida was dealing with hurricane damage, there were some people in California running at the mouth about how they shouldn't have to pay for some other state's natural disasters.
I wonder if they will drown in the coming rains.
I'm willing to bet that there will be Floridians among those helping.
I am equally certain that there were Californian linemen here in Florida restoring power after Irma.
You're probably right about the yakkers, and the helpers.
ReplyDeleteBut there is a difference between "pay for", versus "choose to help".
Power companies, AFAIK, carry their employees at their own expense (which they happily pass along to rate-payers) when they go to help out-of-state, including paid OT, out of enlightened self-interest: they want the same courtesy when it's their turn in the barrel.
No one who goes has a gun held to their head nor is drafted and forced to go.
But Californians shouldn't be paying for people flooded in beach houses after a hurricane in Florida, just as Floridians (nor anyone else) shouldn't be paying for idiots here who build houses at high tide line, or throw up shake-roof homes and log cabins in the local canyons and then look shocked when brushfires happen. And mudslides the following winter.
Those clowns should be told when they build that no insurance is forthcoming at less than premiums of 100% of replacement value per annum, no state or federal disaster relief is available, and maybe they ought to either self-pay, or else stop building flimsy homes in places prone to disaster.
FTR, no one in Hawaii should get a public dime when their house gets eaten by a lava flow either.
Some things are just stupid, and that should hurt.
Greedy local officials who grant building permits for those places without stating that they are relief-free zones in perpetuity should be skinned alive, btw, which is at least half the problem.
One guy in Malibu built a predominantly earth-sheltered house into the peak of his ridgeline, with spectacular ocean views, and when brushfires came, just shut his front door, closed the windows, and watched the fire roll over him through his triple-paned patio glass. Afterwards, his was the only surviving home for miles. He just re-seeded the grass, and waited for winter rains.
That's how you do it.
Mitigating some risk for bona fide once-a-century occurrences should be a wee bit less harsh.
Predictable, every-year-or-three things, not so much.
Yet we in Florida pay for you in California for the yearly wildfires, mudslides, the auto thefts and burglaries and all the other things that insurance pays for. So, well, from a Floridian's standpoint, get stuffed. Clean up your (all y'all Californians) own backyard first before bitching about ours.
DeleteAnd if you think that Florida insurance money doesn't pay for all of California's stupidity, you are patently wrong.
My car insurance went up because y'all Californians can't keep your cars from being stolen and broken into.
The whole purpose of nationwide insurance companies is that, overall, the country as a whole pays for incidents in Tornado Alley, or Snowmaggedons, or Wildfires and Mudslides or Hurricanes.
So, when people in California don't have insurance pay for their beachside houses that have been falling in the ocean for 100 years, or houses wiped out by mudslides that happen every year, or wildfires that happen every year, or floods that happen every year, well, then we can talk about insurance not paying for people to have their homes rebuilt after hurricanes in the Southeast.
My car has a set of oxygen sensors downstream from the catalytic convertors because of California.
DeleteI am locked out of the engine control computer largely because California law to prevent someone from bypassing emissions controls.
My gasoline prices vary wildly, especially in summer, because of the endless numbers of boutique fuel blends consuming valuable refinery capacity.
So the idea that California is enduring a burden from the rest of the nation amuses me.
Or why High Efficiency washers, dryers, dishwashers all suck the big ones. California.
DeleteWhy model paint and glue sucks. California.
Why there's a warning on everything that "This Will Cause Cancer." California.
Why school textbooks are so progressively leftist. California.
Why just about anything has 5,000 pages of warnings and doesn't work nearly as well as the equivalent thing 40 years ago. California.
Who sets car mileage and EV requirements? California.
California has been a burden on the rest of the nation since they went full potato.
Seriously, Florida can and does keep its power grid maintained and vegetation-free on transmission lines. California? Not so much.
I think Florida wins far more than California in sensible government, sensible just about everything. Our biggest problem has been the power of the Mouse House and its effect on Orlando and that seems to be taking care of itself.
Not to mention our governor actually fires prosecutors and other state officials and bureaucrats for not doing their damned jobs. California? Not so much.
Florida got hit by a major hurricane last year about the same time a major offensive in Ukraine was done. Major $$$ was spent in assistance for the Ukes - screw Florida said Biden. Major Republican state administration may have been a factor.
ReplyDeletejrg
Every hurricane season I have to explain to outsiders that we don't get hit with a major hurricane every single year here in Florida. In almost 30 years of living here just the one hurricane went over my house directly. Just a handful of tropical storms too.
ReplyDeleteYet, insurance appears to be calculated to charge as if the property will be destroyed every year. Where does that money go?
Turns out our legal environment for suing insurance companies is largely different from many other states with regards to assigning liability and the limits to that liability.
Unlimited liability to entities who have only a tangential association to the event and no direct blame is a huge problem in our insurance market from medical to homeowners.
Some baby steps to change that took effect in July and the massive spikes in premiums in the last few months will have the voters in Tallahassee demanding more come spring, The problems in our market are firmly within the purview of our legislators, and could be cured in a session of they realize that it's voters who they are accountable to.
Even when we do get hit by a hurricane, unless it's a complete monster like Hurricane Andrew or the one last year, power is restored in days.
DeleteCan't say that about California when they have issues. Nor in the Northeast where after various snowmaggedons it takes weeks to months to restore power (usually because some trees fall on the power lines - see Florida laws requiring keeping the lines cleared.
One year, back in Iowa (hardly a bastion of conservative politics at the time) an unprecedented ice storm took out the electricity by knocking about every branch off of every tree.
DeletePower was out for hours, not days.